SG1 Jags the XFiles
by Aenea
Summary: Crossover between Stargate, JAG and The X-Files. No prior knowledge required. It's hard to describe, just give it a read!
1. Default Chapter

TITLE : SG-1 JAG's the X-Files   
AUTHOR : Perry Tratchett 

Winter hit the District of Colombia with a vengeance, leaving the city of Washington huddling inside the security of it's blankets in a feeble attempt to keep warm. The community's embracement of the Christmas spirit was only just barely up and running despite the larger department stores overwhelming advertising campaigns and their strategic product placement of specific Christmas merchandise for well over a month already. Christmas had no significant momentum of it's own yet. 

Pedestrians dodged the clones of Santa Claus that were camped on virtually every street corner, scrambling away from their bell ringing and their world weary "ho hos". The winter trade in consumer goods was not setting the world on fire, but there were more than a few people living on the streets at that time who would quite happily set some portion of it on fire. It was cold. In fact it was so cold that the doomsayers from Greenpeace had stopped decrying the decadent western societies destruction of the pristine Earth environment and the incipient global green house catastrophe and gone somewhere else to preach their message. Let's face it, arguing that the world is drowning in its own waste heat carries a lot more weight if it is conducted in an actual hot environment. Who's going to listen to that argument when you've got three jumpers on beneath your coat? It might even sound like a good idea. You could sell those people shares in Global Warming INC. Instead, Greenpeace were active in New Zealand and Australia. They might have better used their time in Southern America or South Africa, but those places are dangerous and so the Dreadlocked, nosed pierced warriors tend to avoid them. Besides the peoples of Southern Africa and America's tend not to give donations, except of the streamlined lead pellet variety. Those they give away free of charge (well, it's the free of the charge part that actually results in their being given away, rather quickly as it turns out.) So they go where the money is, and if they can actually convince the French Secret service to do something dumb like sink one of their ships then so much the better in the competition for the consumer market in charitable donations.

But we digress, interesting as that subject may be, it has little to do with snow bound, winter blighted Washington DC. Did we mention that it was cold? Yes, well the wind had teeth, and a wail like a banshee.

Many people were considering the use of chain on their car tyres (of course in their minds they were spelt tires. What sort of spelling is that? My car tires, sounds like it means that it is approaching exhaustion. And there in lies another bad pun. My car is exhausted, it runs from the engine right to the back where it sticks out and belches greenhouse gases into the atmosphere so that the globe can become a warmer and friendlier place). The car owners began searching through the cupboards and cabinets of their garages for the chains, no longer able to remember where they put them.

An increase in the numbers of traffic accidents was inevitable under new the circumstances of adverse weather. In a few cases people were unable to make it to work.

It was not the case with Colonel Sarah Mackenzie. She managed to get to work on time. It might have been a different story if she had an actual life, but that was not the case, so she has no reason to be late for work at all. She pushed through the entrance to her Washington office, waved her way airily through the military security cordon surrounding the lobby and spent a moment in the lobby while she savoured the first feel of the heating on the inflamed skin of her cheeks. 

She began to feel subconscious when she realised that the security detail was already casting glances her way. Their gaze was not the sort of threatening, 'who the hell are you and what are you going to do wrong' sort of look. It was more the 'god I hate winter when a body like that gets wrapped up in layers of padding like that' kind of look. It was all part of that misogynistic male thing, sort of a 'wouldn't I like to make a baby human with that one?' kind of thing really. A sort of gut reaction, hind brain in charge of business, limbic system at the tiller repugnant reptilian behaviour that ensure that the species is continued. Recreational procreation is one thing, but the real business cares little about the personalities and interests of it's participants, it's only interested in the end goal, the perpetuation of the genome. All that other stuff, relationships with deep and meaningful engagements of the soul and such is just froth that accumulated somewhere along the way during the competition that was evolution. Of course the frothy part on the top of the genome-ic carrier that was Sarah Mackenzie sort of had this intellectualisation thing going on. She thought it had some inherent worth of it's own, and I suppose it has when it comes to the provision of the best possible environment for the raising of the next generation of human genome carriers. Sort of puts everything into perspective.

Her good nature and cheery demeanour came under threat whenever she caught them looking at her like that. It was that sort of 'thing' to her. She made the effort, placed her mouth on hold before it got the rest of her into trouble, and strutted through the lobby like she owned the place. It might be prudent to point out at this time, that the shoes she had chosen to wear, while apparently sensible in every way, still had an extravagantly tall heel, thus causing a clenching of her calf muscles and a lengthening of her leg. That always tended to draw the male eye, thus exacerbating the situation with regard to male leering behaviour, particularly when the hem of her skirt makes just the right counterpoint rhythm to her walk. 

Let us consider what has caught the eye of the security desk occupants. Despite her Anglicised surname Sarah Mackenzie's physical appearance suggested her ancestry comprised at least a half part contribution from a Mediterranean rim country. Her dark hair was cut into a neat bob, her skin carried a swarthy tint, slightly more olive than most people with the sort of surname she carried. Her dark eyes were large in a face with a narrow, though full lipped, mouth. Sarah Mackenzie is not Cindy Crawford, nor is she Christie Thurlington, but neither of those women was in the lobby of the Judge Advocate General's office on that particularly nasty winter's morning, and so she was going to have to do. For the sake of fairness, it is not a bad trade. The security guys are happy with their lot. She'll do. Degrading isn't it?

She clicked clacked along the tiled floor to her office, impaled her key in the door and twisted it in the lock. With a herculean effort, she managed not to break the shaft of her key off in the lock. It was a close won thing, a genuine battle between her instinctive anger and her self-interest. Her door fell open; she stepped through the portal and set about preparing for the day. Her gloves sort of found their way into the pocket of her coat and she filed it on the hanger behind her door. One of her gloves fell from it's precarious position at the lip of her coat pocket and landed with a pathetic little plop on the floor. Mackenzie did not notice it's plight, being caught up in her own anger-at-the-dismissal-of-her-intellectual-worth perpetrated by the misogynist Neanderthal on the front desk.

She is not much fun at the moment, so we shall check out her surroundings. Her office was relatively palatial, old wood and heavy furniture, old leather and careful detailing. One wall was lined with book cases, weighed down by a set of tomes, gold embossed and filled with heavy reading; legal precedents. Pages and pages of lovingly crafted arguments and the resulting decisions by the umpires of life, they were the bible by which she worshipped. Sad isn't it the way we still indulge in icons and religious trappings.

Sarah Mackenzie filled a key role on the Judge Advocate General's staff. Her job was almost her life; in fact for a few years it had seemed to be the sum total of her life. It was only recently that she had managed to establish an existence outside the timber and plaster confines of the office. That had been a good thing, and long over due. Unfortunately it had involved becoming entangled with one of those man things. And now, the two of them are engaged, to be married. Most of her friends are still shaking their heads at the whole concept. You see, he is the most pathetic stereotypical machismo Australian. The truth is that those things actually exist, and some of them do have law degrees, but usually they have badly beaten up ears as a result of years spent playing Rugby Union, which the erstwhile Mr Brumby (I mean that's an outdated term for a wild horse. Who they hell would have it as a surname? But hey, it is a weird world. If you check the Sydney white pages you'll find that there are six households with that surname. It's obviously a badly chosen anglicising from another name. It was probably Brumbascowicz or something similar, a couple of generations back. Go figure.) To look at him, Brumby obviously did not play Rugby Union while he was studying at the University of Sydney. His ears just do not have the right look about them. There are no bite marks and they do not have the right 'cauliflower shape.' Brumby is so obviously and appallingly stereotypical that his presence in a room would make Mick 'Crocodile' Dundee cringe with embarrassment. (Perhaps that is untrue, his latest movie suggests even Mick Dundee has no shame). Dragging Councillor Brumby into the rarefied confines of the Washington legal fraternity and the little circle where the Ivy Leaguers practise law as a sort of pissing contest, is not quite as bad as bringing George of the Jungle home to LA, but it took a photo to pick the actual winner. In that respect Ursula and Sarah Mackenzie have a lot in common (and a lot to answer for).

Now that we have completed our critique of her love life and identified the hypocrisy of which she was guilty when selecting her mate, we can resume the story. When Sarah Mackenzie was actually working, she also acted as a barrister (educated in a good Ivy League school, at great cost). She either represented military staff, or the armed forces themselves, in a non-stop whirl of courts martial and civilian court proceedings. 

Other than her choice of life mates, all the above would suggest she was a bright woman who could be expected to be aware of her surroundings. And that was normally true. She has shown great skill in avoiding the pitfalls of distraction. She rarely bumps into walls and most people would struggle to remember the last time she spilled coffee on herself. We can take it as gospel the fact that she does not normally go through her life in a daze. Except, an hour after her arrival in the office, her demeanour was unusual enough to justify some concern among the rest of the staff.

After being away from the office for a couple of days she had arrived at her normal time, and settled into her office for the morning. Then she had done something unusual. She spent quite some time drifting around the office looking totally perplexed, sipping absently from a mug filled with coffee, and staring absently into space. Several times she had to rely on the awareness and dexterity of others to avoid wearing a brand new coffee stain on her neatly pressed, but hopelessly impractical, uniform. After an hour of useless movement, she isolated herself in her office and stared into space. It was safer that way. Her hands were folded in front of her, half supporting a file that she was supposed to be reading. She placed it back on the desk and ignored it for a while, lost in what ever thoughts were consuming her.

The desk she sat behind was a heavy timber monstrosity overburdened in this instance by paper arranged into neat piles, and files that were arranged where she could fill them with paper from those same piles. Behind her head hung the framed copy of her Law Degree. It had been some time since she had even looked at it let alone admired her achievement.

She sighed heavily, straining the buttons of her blouse somewhat more than was normally the case in their precarious button type existence. The designers of the uniforms worn by the female officers in the Judge Advocate General's department of the US Military had obviously not considered the likelihood of women whose waist to bust measurements was so disparate. In some ways her anatomical arrangement explained the fascination she caused for the desk Sergeant and the security detail that worked with him. It was attention that was only welcome when it was encouraged. During her working time she made no attempt to encourage the attention, but it seemed to track her down any way.

The expression on her face reflected a sad case of bafflement and it wasn't helping her in her duties that her mood reflected her appearance. Her work was suffering, and she was uncomfortably aware of the cause of her disquiet. 

The effort she was expending in filing was more a desire to indulge in make-work, than any genuine operational necessity. She was doing it so she didn't have to think too hard about the events of the previous few days. She had just been forced to process too much too quickly, she decided and she had sprained her brain. Give it a few days rest and it should be as right as rain (whatever the hell that means? Does rain have political leanings? Is there such a thing as wrong rain? Even the grammar checker picked that trite little cliché up and wanted to correct it, but I wouldn't let it. Strike one, a blow for humanity against the oppressive Microsoft regime, attempting to dictate the use of the English language (note, not the American language, that includes phrases like Yo dude, wot's happening, and the associated body contortions that form part of the gestalt))

Oh yeah, back to the story…

The case Sarah Mackenzie had just finished was one of the most baffling incidents in her short career. No, not one of, she decided, easily the most baffling. By a long, long way. (OK, so she lacked conviction, but that is perfectly understandable. Normally it was her clients who got the convictions, so yeah, I guess lawyers always lack convictions.)

Mackenzie had only arrived back in the office that morning. After spending a few days away on a field assignment that had been so hush-hush that even her secretary had not been informed of where she was going. In fact even the office gossip had not known where she had gone and that took some doing. 

Mackenzie was indulging in that time honoured psychological technique for handling traumatic or confronting experiences; she was ignoring it and trying to come to grips with the paper work that had piled up during her absence. 

By indulging in this mindless activity, one that her secretary could well do both more efficiently and at much less cost, she was hiding from what she might have done, that is to say think, which might become brooding if she relaxed. The Paper Mountain (still yet to be conquered, the one true peak left in this worlds to test the skills of modern mountaineers) had loomed at her when she pushed through the door. She had pounced on it. It offered her some therapeutic activity while she came to grips with the real work of her department. So far she was losing the paperwork war, she seemed to be picking each piece up from the pile, reading it thoroughly, putting it down, forgetting what it said and picking it back up again. It was totally counterproductive obviously, but she was enjoying herself. The temptation to dump it all into a garbage bin and wait until the sender complained started to seem like a good way to handle the situation. So as therapy it was close to achieving it's desired goal.

She wouldn't do something like dumping it all in the bin of course. That was just not something that she would to that pile of paper. It was unthinkable. It would not have been 'right.' Although she wasn't conscious of her motives, the reality was that she had risen within the military ranks until she was close to the glass ceiling. The only way for her to get through it was to keep her nose spotlessly clean and butt the ceiling hard until either the ceiling, or her head (depending on the hardness of each), shattered. She had seen the latter occurrence more often than the former during her career. Many of those situations were resolved through the use of her legal expertise, and it was not a thought she entertained happily. 

She faces a political and professional crisis. Admiral was her next step up the ladder. Female admirals were few and far between. Female Admirals with legal qualifications were non-existent. Career progression was probably going to require either private practice or politics. Neither offered her a great deal of potential satisfaction, being essentially a liar's contest in both cases.

The one good part was her lack of obligation to the Government any more. She could resign if she chose. They no longer owned her soul. (The mortgage had been discharged a few years back with the last payment of blood.)

She could resign anytime at all. If she chose…She was old enough now to know her own mind and what she wanted. Leaving the military was not an option…yet.

Her reflection in the glass panel of her office door caught her eye. She was an attractive woman, in a round faced, baby doll sort of way. She was somewhat past her thirtieth birthday and just starting to think about how much (or how little) make-up best suited a face that had once glowed with it's own youthful collagen filled good looks. Her face now carried a few fine lines that she could cover if she chose to, but she wondered about whether that made her look younger… Or did it make her look like she was trying to look younger (Which is not the same thing at all), and whether that was a good thing or not. In five more years that conundrum would all be decided, right at the moment, that dilemma was still real.

It was a good face, she decided. It served her well. There was still a trace of the humorous glow about the eyes that had served her as a younger woman. It now had a touch of character, overlaying the inherently even bone structure and that set her apart from the other - she hesitated to use a word like 'bubbling', with its negative connotations - girls who paraded around the office. 

The door moved and her view of her own reflection was lost.

Commander Harmon Rabka appeared at her door. With a name like that, it might be expected that his appearance would suggest similar ethnic extraction to Sarah Mackenzie. Instead he appeared to be typical WASP, even featured, with that could-be-any-age look that some men can carry around between the age of twenty five and forty. His brown hair was cut neatly and short, without being cropped. 

Rebka and Mackenzie were of a similar age, and yet she out-ranked him. In the scheme of things military that was an unusual circumstance suggesting that his ethnic background might actually play against his promotional prospects more completely than did her gender. Glass ceilings do not withhold on gender lines alone. 

"You look distracted," he offered. He leant against the doorjamb and waved an empty coffee cup in her direction.

She looked up at him and blinked for a moment, bringing her attention back to the here and now. "You better believe it," she told him.

He invited himself into her office and seated himself around the back of one of her office visitor's chairs. "What is it? Something about that case you were working on for the last few days," he guessed.

"Yeah something like that," she seemed to consider options for a few minutes. "Listen you've got the same security clearance I have," she said suddenly. "Check out this story."


	2. Chapter 2

Admiral Chegwidden called Sarah Mackenzie to his office. She was grateful for the distraction. For a couple of days she had tried unsuccessfully to come up with a useful angle on a desertion charge that she was obliged to defend. The case looked hopeless but she intended giving the man the best possible defence, if only for pride's sake. 

Any interruption to her ruminations was welcome. Gratefully, she placed the file back onto her desk, checked the state of her uniform in the reflection from the back of the door and hustled into the corridor.

The hallway was essentially empty. Her heels click-clacked on the hard tiled floor and the sound echoed through the emptiness. The story of how hush-hush the case was had echoed throughout the corridors as well. Chewidden's secretary had spoken with the canteen staff who had relayed the information to the desk Sergeant who had told the janitorial staff who had… Beyond that point the causal chain got rather confused. By the time Sarah Mackenzie knocked on the Admirals door she was probably the only person in the building who was unaware that a real doozey had dropped itself on the Admiral's lap.

Chegwidden's secretary waved her through the open door with a cautious smile. Mackenzie returned the grin and stepped through the door. She closed it behind her. Within minutes the canteen staff would know that it was Mackenzie that was handling the case and so on through the grapevine once again.

The Admiral stood behind his desk, making a display of his old-fashioned courtliness that was both out of line and out of date. In this man's navy (and again we have an example of political incorrectness) he was restrained from making any distinction between the male and female members of his staff. His actions, in rising to greet her entrance, was not high on her list of sexist slights and therefore not commented-on at this stage of her career. Perhaps later on, we shall wait and see what happens. 

He waited for Colonel Mackenzie to stride across his office floor. Her step was forced into mincing fussiness by the cut of her uniform skirt. Only a catwalk model had a hope of walking in one of those things and we all know how they walk (strut, sashay, whatever). The sort of way they carry themselves doesn't look like it's good for long life of the hip joints. Orthopaedic surgeons are probably looking forward to the upsurge of hip replacements among the emaciated, drug riddled and wealthy. 

Sarah Mackenzie reached out one neatly manicured hand, took one of the chairs from beneath his desk and seated herself. She crossed her legs primly, arranged her skirt, so the pleat was neat and waited intently.

Chegwidden resumed his seat moments after Mackenzie. He was a kindly faced man of late middle years, balding and cropped pate, his physical fitness obvious in his bearing, and obviously good for any age, not just his own. He waited a moment before speaking. Sarah Mackenzie waited patiently for him to open the conversation. 

Outside his office window, the snow was floating ground-ward. The fall that began a day or two earlier showed no signs of abating. It was the season's first fall (although it seemed intent on being a good one), and added the first traces of yule-tide to proceedings (that is to say it was already bitterly cold). Mackenzie watched it for a moment, getting her thoughts into order, clearing her mind for a briefing. The conversational delay was suitably long; enough to suggest Admiral Chegwidden was struggling to come up with the best slant on what he had to say. 

"We have a unique situation here Mac," he said finally. He folded his hands on the desk. "An old acquaintance of mine has asked a favour. I wish I could tell you about it properly. I just don't have enough detail to be able to describe the case to you." He shrugged. "It's one of those slit your own throat before reading security issues."

That was not good news to Sarah Mackenzie. Cases of that type had 'nasty compromise' and 'messy politics' written all over them in large type. You won no friends, you alienated many people and you accumulated enemies that you often couldn't identify after the dust settled. Well, that is not always the case. Usually the enemy is the one holding the handle of the (insert weapon of choice here, the default choice is knife) that is embedded up to the hilt in the flesh of your back.

"Yes sir," she agreed. "Is it urgent?" What she really meant was, is there some chance I could resign before the excrement lands on the ventilation impeller.

He nodded grimly. "They're looking for an immediate start. Can you travel?"

OK, this wasn't good. In fact it had gone from bad, through to worse and was hovering just short of Armageddon. "Now?"

He nodded. How could such a kindly-looking man take on the aspect of an executioner just by a simple gesture like a nodded head? "Within the hour."

She thought about all the ways she could say no. There was the time honoured and elegantly simple 'no' or the classic avoidance type response of 'can I think about it?' or even the subtle such as 'are you sure I'm the best choice for this?' piece of responsibility avoidance. What she actually said was; "Should be possible. I have a bag ready, we all do." 

He knew that, it was standard procedure for their office. They all waited for the chance to serve.

"I wouldn't have asked if I didn't know that already," he said.

"Thank you sir."

"You have an hour before your flight." He pushed a file across to her. The folder was depressingly thin.

*

Sarah Mackenzie stepped from the staff car and straight into the knife edged wind that blew in across the snow. She wrapped her jacket more tightly around herself and stepped carefully away from the car while the driver fussed with her luggage in the trunk. The helipad was occupied. The idling rotor blew the thin snow off the pad and whipped her hair around.

With any luck this assignment might be in sunnier climes, she speculated. Florida would be nice, or perhaps Tijuana, although on second thoughts, Sydney might be the best option. There had been no mention of location in the file, precious little of anything useful as a matter of fact. The file had contained just a letter advising who would meet her, and a few declaration-of-secrecy forms to be filled out in quintuplicate, endorsed by God before being witnessed by seven Archangels and two Muses.

She noted the obvious presence of a warm and running chopper that was obviously waiting for her, and searched the shadows that it cast for her contact. Ah, there he was. A man stepped from the shadow of the chopper and strode across to intercept her. 

"Colonel Jack O'Neill, SGC," her escort introduced himself. That was almost the same as the name in the file. It explained what the "J" stood for anyway.

US marine Corp, she read from his shirt. He was a career soldier from the looks of him. Obviously ten years or more older than her and still only at the same rank, one step down from a Generalship. It was obvious to her that he would only ever achieve that promotion in the event of a war. Something that required a field officer, so he could go out and order lots of boys and girls to shoot at someone else's boys and girls with big guns and get the field promotion. At the moment, with peace essentially (and inconveniently) broken out throughout the US sphere of influence, the military was best served by the peacetime officers - bureaucratic diplomats rather than active field officers. And it's probably just as well for the rest of us. Imagine leaving someone like Colin Powell in charge of a key portfolio during peacetime. I mean the mind boggles. What do you mean, they have? Oh, dear…That's… a cause for… concern? Is there space in a fall out shelter somewhere?

Sarah Mackenzie summed Jack O'Neill up with a glance. His hair was a peppering of sandy grey. His face was square-jawed and craggy, dimples had become creases, crows feet had become permanent. His eyes seemed set into a fixed squint, as though he was sighting at the world over the barrel of an AK-47. His voice was dry, virtually without inflection, although his accent placed him as slightly south and well to the west of where she had met him. He was no Ivy League graduate, but possessed a measured, and she suspected sardonic, intelligence that looked out at her from beneath those lowered brows. He carried himself with the stride of a combat veteran, square shouldered and straight backed. 

"Colonel Sarah Mackenzie, Judge Advocate General's department," she shouted over the whine of the Apache's turbines and the howl of the wind. She took a flake of snow into her mouth for good measure.

"I know colonel," he shouted in return. "If you will follow me please?" He escorted her to the awaiting Apache Blackhawk. The aircraft had been stripped of armament, she noted, and fitted with long range tanks. He gestured toward the open door to the chopper as though to welcome her aboard. This close to the chopper, speaking was a waste of time, the noise of the turbine and the chop of the blades made the whole concept of speaking to be vaguely ludicrous.

She hesitated a moment at the entrance to the chopper's passenger compartment. Her hand secured her cap to her head when the gale kicked up the chopper threatened to blow it into Chesapeake Bay. She pointed to the insignia on his shirt. "SGC?" she bellowed into his face, bothered by the implications of the embroidered letters of the insignia that identified him as belonging to Earth. It seemed a pretty vague designation to her.

"I'll explain it later," he cried back at her, neutrally. "Let's get aloft first."

The staff driver finished placing her bag aboard, leaving her hesitation as the only impediment to lift off. She shrugged and hoisted herself into the steps leading into the passenger compartment, fighting the constrains of her skirt the whole time. 

The interior of the plane was spartan. Plastic seat cushions exposed buttressed framework and seat belts seemed to be all of the internal decorations. A pair of headset microphones/ear muffs hung from one wall. They were already jacked into the communications console. 

Ahead of Mackenzie, the pilot was revealed. She appeared to be a youngish female. He rank bars suggested airforce Major. The face that peeked out from beneath the flight goggles, and surrounded by the headphones, was young, smiling and dimpled. She would have been slightly younger than Sarah Mackenzie was. As a pilot and major at her age and with her gender, it was quite an achievement.

"Major Samantha Carter," the pilot introduced herself. They shook hands awkwardly over the back of her flight seat. "I know who you are," she said before Mackenzie could say anything. Mackenzie was slightly put off by the brush off, but it had been delivered good-naturedly. She regarded her pilot for a moment trying to work out what she was about and how they should interact. It was no use trying to make judgements about the woman; she just gave the impression of good-natured competence and that was far too little information to use in forming an opinion. Mackenzie finished clambering into the passenger compartment, struggling with the confining hem of her skirt. She experienced a trace of envy, the heavy combat fatigues worn by their pilot were so much more practical than the uniform she was obliged to wear in JAG. When she got back to the office she was going to take that up with the Admiral, and see if she could get that changed. And like that was any possibility. She had been to court in Canada, and Australia, and had seen the gowns and the powdered wigs. Perhaps there were more ridiculous outfits inflicted on the legal fraternity.

The Marine Colonel boosted himself into the plane with an athletic grace and began fussing with his seat harness. Mac had already secured herself, the moment she had hit the seat. "All set Sam," O'Neill called forward.

"Lifting in thirty," the pilot called back over her shoulder. She pulled the microphone around to cover her mouth and began speaking in low tones to someone outside of their noisy little cocoon.

"Sorry about the rush," O'Neill called across to Mackenzie. His voice was barely audible over the growing whine of the turbine engine and the moving volume of air disturbed by the idling rotors. The rotors accelerated. The aircraft bobbled on the ground momentarily. O'Neill handed Mackenzie a set of headphones with integral microphone and went about donning a pair himself. Mackenzie placed the head set over her hair, seated it against her ears and manipulated the microphone so that it sat adjacent to her mouth. "Am I coming through clearly?" she asked.

Samantha Carter threw an OK-gesture over her shoulders and, fed more power to the rotors. The helicopter wallowed above the pad, pivoted on its axis and began climbing away the middle of Washington. Carter arrowed the aircraft inland. They accelerated as only a combat craft can.


	3. Chapter 3

The suburban sprawl of Washington (District of Columbia) passed beneath them, accompanied by the noise and drama of the rotors struggling to hold the Apache in the air. What with the combination of clouds, snow, wind and noise, it was not the sort of environment that Sarah Mackenzie would have preferred to spend her day. She always had the feeling that those things shouldn't have been able to fly. I mean just look at them… 

Samantha Carter was busy interfacing with the civilian air traffic control and confirming clearance of her flight path, and generally trying to prevent such unnecessarily noisy things such as air disasters and other unfortunate incidents. O'Neill stared into space, lost in his own thoughts. Mackenzie was left to her own devices - and left to her own thoughts. What with her suspicion that helicopters shouldn't be able to fly, her thoughts were a dark and horrible place to visit, so we won't. 

Within a mater of seconds after lift-off they hit the canopy of cloud and that was it for a while, total lack of entertainment. The world was white, and dead boring. And of course that leads to the whole question of how helicopters fly and why they shouldn't…. 

MacKenzie bit back on that thought.

Immediately after lift off, the chopper had turned Westward. The cloud cover broke up the further inland they flew. For a while they followed the roadways to the south-west until the traffic thinned and the houses sprawled. It was not the normal civilian flight path that they took. Domestic air traffic was constrained to avoid overflying suburban landscape, as much as the prevailing winds allowed. Voters had a terrible tendency to vote (often 'no' in resounding ticks) when things like aircraft noise intruded on their daily lives. Getting them to vote for a President couldn't be done with a presidential order, but make a noise over their heads with a sardine can full of travel weary bureaucrats and business people and watch how fast their voting finger twitches. And on that subject how can you run a country when the only people who vote are the ones who care enough to front up. Who represents the disaffected and apathetic? How can their say be heard in the annals of power? If you don't care, how can you get that message across to the representatives?

Mackenzie left the pair of them to their silences for a while, but she had to gather information. The briefing she was given before she set off had been…brief. It was time to correct that problem. She waved for O'Neill's attention. "Just what is the emergency that requires a JAG all the way out… where?" she asked.

He brought his attention back to her with a weary resignation. His indifference to her was something of a welcome change from the weight of every-man's eyes back in her office. She wasn't sure which was worse, their heavy-handed lechery, or his complete disregard. "We're on our way to Wyoming," he said laconically. "It's a secured Multi-departmental facility in the Rocky Mountains."

"Wyoming?" OK, that was a bit of a surprise. In an Apache? "That'll be a, what, a five hour flight?"

"Four, this is not your standard Apache." He began staring out to space again. His posture was dismissive, as though he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. She had come across that sort of attitude many times in the past. Clandestine operatives always seemed to be closed like that, they never leant how to fold back into the mainstream society. They totally lost the social graces of small talk and interaction by being focussed on silences as a way to prevent kicking in their teeth with their own foot (metaphorically speaking of course. Although O'Neill was perfectly capable of putting his foot literally in his mouth, it was part of the military combat training.) He probably thought small talk meant typing in 6 point font.

"And then?" she prompted.

Her question brought O'Neill back from whatever internal reverie he had lost himself in for the moment. "We have a civilian," he explained slowly, "an FBI agent. He is being held in alien hands. Not hostile exactly, but not friendly either. We need an advocate to – negotiate his return." 

She tried to guess who that might be. China were inimical, one would never call them friendly under any circumstances. The Russians? That was a more likely possibility. Her Yugoslavia ancestry might be an advantage. She spoke Russian. The whole exercise made sense under those conditions. She thought she had a handle on what was going on. Shows her capacity for self delusion.

"Here," O'Neill said suddenly. He handed her a dossier that must have been five inches thick. "Everything you need to know is in here. Read your way through that. After you've finished, I'm at liberty to answer any questions you might have." His manner suggested that the questions had better be good ones to justify his attention.

The chopper blasted above the outer suburbs of Washington and made for the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It was a journey that was going to take them two thirds of the way across the country.

Mackenzie opened the file, flicked at a few pages at random. She noted the constant references to ultra-top secret and groaned inwardly. It looked like it was going to be everything she thought it was going to be. With a heavy heart and a loud sigh, she began the laborious task of preparing herself for what she might be required to do.


	4. Chapter 4

Sarah Mackenzie looked up from her distracted gaze at her clasped hands. She paused in mid story and drew breath, tilted her head from side to side for a moment as though easing a stiff neck. She had been talking for almost half an hour and her throat was starting to make vague protests to it's union about misuse.

"So what was it about?" Harmon Rebka asked her. He still nursed the empty coffee cup, she noticed. He had obviously been on his way to the kitchen and she had distracted him from that important task.

"Were you going to fill that?" she asked, pointing at the cup he clasped in his hands.

He looked down at the cup as though seeing it for the first time. It was a dirty cup he noticed, still had a coffee bath ring from the last cup he had left half finished late the previous day. "I was," he said and tried to hide that fact that he was nursing a dirty cup. It wouldn't suit his image of immaculately presented perfection to be seen with a dirty cup. "I probably still will. Tell on though," he said waving the cup about. "I want to hear what this was all about."

"This is going to blow you away," Mac said. "You sure you don't want to go and get one before we go on?"

"Not now Mac. You've got me intrigued. I want to know how this turns out."

"It's a long story," she warned.

"It's still early. The day is young yet."

"You're sure."

"God, just get on with it."

*

Beneath the thumming of the rotors and the nasal whining noise of the turbine, Sarah Mackenzie leafed through the dossier. She was having trouble making sense of the first few entries.

The malignant presence of Jack O'Neill didn't help her concentration. He sat across from her, sharing in the limited confines of the chopper physically, but gave little else away. His face was turned away. His mind was a long way away. She wasn't sure she wanted to know what was going on under the baseball cap he had perched on his head. She kept staring at the SGC emblem. What did it stand for? South Guadalcanal? Secured Ground Control? Suck Grit and choke? See God's creations? Some Great Cockup? It might have been amusing, but it wasn't getting her anywhere.

She turned back to the file. Only one thing for it, she decided, start at the beginning and work your way through. The chronology seemed to be such that the oldest files were at the back. She hated that organisation method, even though she used it herself. You were always mindful of the staples. It was only way you could figure out where one document ended and another started.

The first report her eyes lit upon was a description of an archaeological dig in Egypt. OK. She frowned and read the abstract. It gave her no clues as to why it had been included, so she read on, ploughing her way through a laboriously concise account of the progress being made at the dig (today we shifted dirt with a shaving brush. We must have moved almost a cubic metre between the eleven of us) and described an artefact that they had uncovered. It only added to her confusion. OK, there were no answers in that one.

There were photographs; they depicted a stone ring. Oh, that was enlightening. She had no way of gauging scale. She looked at the for a moment, tried to work out which way was up, gave up and placed them back in the little envelopes they came from. For a moment she considered the possibility that her leg was being pulled, as Brumby would say.

The next report in the file was a long memorandum, demanding that the artefact be taken under the jurisdiction of a combined task force. There were a lot of references to previous memos on the subject. None of those were in the file, and the context of the memorandum was lost because of their lack. She flicked forward a few weeks in the file, but found no copies of those missing documents.

She decided to try for a more interactive approach to her information gathering. She pointed to insignia on O'Neill's epelette. "What does that stand for?" It had obviously gotten the better of her. She had run out of inspired acronyms.

He looked at her for a moment, almost as though he was considering whether to answer her question at all. "The SGC stands for Stargate Command," O'Neill explained.

Sarah Mackenzie blinked for a moment. If her leg was pulled much harder, it was going to tear off, she decided.

O'Neill looked away. A break in the clouds gradually appeared beneath them. Sarah Mackenzie followed O'Neill's eye line and saw the passing scenery. Beneath the chopper the snow-speckled houses had thinned out almost to the spacing of farming homesteads. They were travelling extremely quickly now. Their altitude was still increasing. The clouds seemed to be mostly below them now, like someone had blown up a cotton gin, and then left the wreckage out to cover the paddock.

" 'Star Gate' as in what?" Mac asked. For a moment she thought she had heard that wrong. The sound transmitted through the internal communications channel was poor, often coming through their headphones as a barely audible series of scratches. The microphones that they all wore were voice activated. As a consequence, the first syllable of any sentence was lost. It was always better to start a speech by uttering something articulate like "Umm" to get the microphone's attention.

"As in gate to the stars," answered the voice of Samantha Carter through the internal comm circuit.

Mac blinked again. They couldn't both be in on the joke, surely. "As in research project for space travel?" She asked. Her voice was still working while her brain tried to catch up, making sounds for the sake of reserving space in the conversation. 

She did have a few coherent thoughts by the time her mouth had finished the place holding exercise. That would explain their listing their place of origin as Earth, she decided. It was a morale thing. Sort of a group-bonding piece of half-baked psychology. That sort of half-baked personnel management was typical of the Military, in her experience. It would be there on the off chance that they ever achieved anything. That being the case, it was a good idea to put the return to sender thing on the envelope, so the recipient could reject the thing when it turned up at the wrong address. Not a real likely venture, but hey what did the embroidery cost? A machine did it anyway.

"Something like that," agreed Carter to Mackenzie's question. Carter exchanged a look with O'Neill. 

Mackenzie had to replay the conversation in the comfort of her own head so she could remember what she had suggested. Oh, yeah, that. Damn.

"They'll explain more when we get to our base," Carter said evasively.

"But…" she was only reserving space in the conversation again. Sarah Mackenzie had nothing coherent to say at that moment.

"Just read on Colonel," O'Neill said blandly. "It's all in there." He pointed to the dossier on her lap.

She picked the dossier up from her lap and flicked to the next document. It was a budget requisition form for…

How much money? She checked and she found that, yeah, all the zeros were in the right place, that was, in fact, Billions they were talking about.


	5. Chapter 5

The Apache put down smoothly on a concrete pad that someone had built in the middle of nowhere. Dust blew in from across the barren landscape, making only a change in colour from the powdered snow that had been scattered around their departure point. Outside the immediate area of the helipad, conifers had replaced the squat military buildings that marked their Washington base. They were impressively tall; similar to the commercial high rise that ranged behind the JAG building near the Pentagon.

Sarah Mackenzie looked around the landing field disappointed. For a state that could claim the Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming could certainly turn on the bland and barren with the best of them.

Carter cut back the fuel feed to the drive, allowing the turbine to wind down. The noise levels were still oppressive. Mackenzie thought she would be carrying a ringing in her ears for some time to come yet. Tinnitus, it was called, she remembered irrelevantly.

She was uncomfortably aware of the fact that she hadn't eaten for close to six hours. The lack of fluids had been welcome in the limited confines of the chopper, given its lack of facilities, but now she was parched and hungry.

"How much further?" she asked Samantha Carter.

"It's about a ten minute drive from here," she said and pointed into the hills.

A jeep waited for them in the cleared scrub immediately outside the line of the concrete pad. A Marine Sergeant occupied the driver's seat, looking suitably bored with proceedings. He leapt out of the vehicle to help with their disembarkation, as though it was the highlight of his day. Which it just might have been thought Sarah Mackenzie unkindly. She was right, but that just made the situation all the more tragic.

Sarah Mackenzie climbed awkwardly from the passenger compartment, again hamstrung by the confines of her skirt's hem and cursed the designers of her uniform. It was certainly impractical. With a tinge of envy she watched Samantha Carter leap athletically through the pilot's door and turn to toss all of her paraphernalia onto the pilot's chair.

A second jeep was on its way to the helipad Mackenzie realised. Carter was going to accompany them, leaving the chopper behind. That was a possibility that Mackenzie hadn't anticipated.

The weather was still cool, despite the brilliant sunshine that illuminated the day. For all that it was blessedly warmer than the weather she had left behind in Washington. It was probably the greatest benefit she could gain from this assignment. A thin quality to the cold air told Mackenzie that they must have landed at a reasonable altitude.

The marine sergeant was obviously waiting for them. Mackenzie took her seat in the front of the jeep while the Sergeant tossed her bag into the back of the jeep. Carter and O'Neill leapt into the back seat. O'Neill's ubiquitous sunglasses hid his eyes. Something about the body language of those two suggested a certain proprietary attitude on both parts. It was probably the lack of body space they left between themselves. They weren't touching, but there was just too little space between them for people who only worked together. Mackenzie wonder how far that chemistry had been taken, and then decided that it was none of her business…Yet. At some later date there might be some sort of fraternisation issue to settle.

The ride was short, which was just as well because it was also bumpy, being almost as far in the little up and down motions as it was in the big along motion. They squeaked to a halt and pulled up at a security gate that had been placed outside the tunnel entrance to what was obviously a subterranean facility. It was probably meant to look like a disused mine. In fact that might be what it was, but the 'newness' of the infrastructure suggested it was built too recently to be disused already. Although to be completely fair, there are mines that get the geology completely wrong during the exploration phase and go bankrupt almost before they get going. It's referred to as mining the widows and orphans funds, and is depressingly common. Usually they sell for a song to some sort of major corporation looking for a strategic way to waste shareholder funds. This one was altogether too malevolent in outward appearance to be one of those operations. The guy at the gate had the letters MP on his armband and, it's not that he was happy to see Mae West; that actually was a gun on his hip.

Mackenzie realised that the mine-like appearance might for the benefit of spy satellites and high altitude reconnaissance planes.

It was in the middle of the USA. Who were they hiding it from? She had an uncomfortable idea that it might be hidden from the people of the USA.

Their driver flashed his ID. O'Neill waved to the gate guard and the boom gate rose to allow them to pass. They drove through the portal that marred the side of the hill, and down a steep-ish grade before the road (tunnel) opened into a brilliantly lit cavern way beneath the peak of the hill. The driver brought their jeep to a halt in a painted parking bay and shut the engine down. All Sarah Mackenzie could hear was the whum whum of large ventilation fans at work. The place smelled of concrete and stone dust, and seemed to be completely artificial.

O'Neill leapt out of the jeep, grabbed Mackenzie's bag from the back of the jeep and threw it over his shoulder. He thumped a button on the wall, placed his face against a retinal scan reader and waited until the speaker above the security door chimed. An elevator door slid aside to reveal a small lift. O'Neill stepped inside and gestured for the two women to follow. Their driver waited at parade rest until the door closed.

The door closed behind them and they rode the elevator deep into the bowels of the Earth. No levels were presented in the little display above the OTIS nameplate. The ride seemed to go forever.

When the elevator came to rest, Sarah Mackenzie was staring up at the blank CRT display, trying to puzzle out the number of levels they had plummeted, when the door opened and she missed the fact that the corridor outside the elevator door was already occupied.

"Colonel Mackenzie, meet General Hammond," said O'Neill in his laconic manner. His comment brought Mackenzie back to the world with a start. 

She had been presented to a man who was of average height and more than average girth. He was somewhat less than hirsute. In fact he had a head like a billiard ball and a neck like a bull. His uniform covered his barrel of a body as though it was sown together while he was inside it rather than buttoned around him like everyone else's. It probably was sewn onto him. There can't be any other way that he could get that neck inside that collar.

"Pleased to have you on board," the General said. His voice was smooth and deep. He shook her hand. "If you will just come this way? We can get this show in the road. Has Jack filled you in on what we are doing here and what we need from you?"

"Briefly," she said non-committal-ly.

O'Neill and Carter stepped from the elevator ahead of Mackenzie and fell in behind General Hammond. Mackenzie stepped through the elevator door and joined them, looking around at the bland décor of the subterranean facility. A team of four marines hustled past them, momentarily filling the corridor. They seemed to be covered by a fine layer of desert sand. No explanation was offered and the General Hammond led the little delegation away from the lift. Mackenzie stared after them for a moment, confused. 

They walked through grey corridors that seemed to echo their footsteps back from miles away before they finally came to door marked 'operations room'. 

Mackenzie decided to chance her arm. She hustled up to General Hammond. "Can I see the stargate?" she asked.

"Certainly Colonel," Hammond agreed affably. "It was the first thing we meant for you to see in any case. Major Carter? Can you do the honours?"

"Certainly sir," Carter stepped forward and beckoned Mackenzie through the door and led her across the operations room. Mackenzie followed along behind, taking in the organised but apparently chaotic activity that had been revealed when they opened the door. She found herself surrounded by the latest in graphic user interface technology operating through a networked computer system. Considered from her point of view, Mackenzie might have been looking at an air traffic control centre or the operations centre of a nuclear power station, the facility was so technologically dependent. A number of operators sat in a semi-circle beneath the gaze of a wide glass window. They worked intently. An expectant hush filled the room. Over their heads a counter ticked down the seconds to some important future event. She had no idea of what it might be.

Samantha Carter stepped forward and gestured for Sarah Mackenzie to step over to the window. The pair of them squeezed into the small space between a couple of computer desks, momentarily upsetting the work of a NCO technician. Mackenzie apologised for the interruption and then looked toward Carter. 

With a flourish of her arms, Carter presented the gate, as though it were her baby. She seemed to radiate expectation. Sarah Mackenzie looked through the window and down at the device that sat in the centre of the cavern. Her confusion escalated. She was looking into a giant cavern cut into the native rock. The void would have been close to twenty metres wide and at least ten metres high.

A gigantic circular thing dominated the space within the imposing subterranean cavity. It carried the appearance of a carefully machined stone ring. Around the periphery, the builders had engraved runes into the device, strange eldritch shapes that appeared to contain meaning beyond the squiggles that they might have appeared to be to an observer that indulged in just a hasty inspection. The ring was about forty centimetres thick and approximately five metres in diameter. Inside the ring, an irised shutter had been installed, something like the aperture that controlled the light fed through a camera lens, but executed on a seriously grand scale. Its purpose was obvious. The iris was meant to block an opening that would have engulfed the full five metres of the gate's diameter. 

"Has it worked yet?" Sarah Mackenzie asked breathlessly. She was struggling to keep her mouth from gaping open and to keep her brain in gear.

"You obviously haven't read the entire briefing," concluded General Hammond.

"Long story," O'Neill told her.

"Are there any other areas that Colonel Mackenzie is not yet appraised?" General Hammond asked O'Neill.

"Lot's sir, we kinda gave her a lot to take in at short notice."

"Hrmmph."

O'Neill seemed to be impervious to the rebuke.

"Come on, you need to meet the Delegate," General Hammond said to Sarah Mackenzie. He pushed the door to a conference room open and stepped aside so she could walk through ahead of him. Men have been holding doors open for women for centuries. It is in no way a sign of respect or courtly manners, it's purely and simply so that the men can watch the women's butts move while the men walk along behind them. The door holding gesture is a way of achieving that physical arrangement without making it more obvious than it needs to be. As we have already discussed, Mackenzie often had her butt checked out. It was one of life's little trials and she just had to live with it.

So it was that she was not concentrating on what was in the room, rather she was concentrating on what the people behind her were doing while she stepped into the room and consequently she was not paying the levels of attention to the events ahead of her that they demanded. 

A delegation awaited her in the conference room and it was going to change the way she looked at the world. As soon as she starts taking input from her eyes, rather than listening to the crap that finds itself ploughing through her head, things are seriously going to change around here. 

First she saw that lunch was layed on, placed along the table for a large contingent, she noted its existence thankfully. She was starving after the long chopper ride without food. That was one primary need met, so she was able to raise her attention from the survival criteria.

She stepped quickly through the door and turned toward General Hammond expectantly, waiting for an introduction to the people who were already in the room and awaited her. 

She was prepared to meet with a Russian advocate. She had even worked out a list of names, the possible members of the consular staff who might be awaiting her.

Instead she saw…


	6. Chapter 6

Sarah Mackenzie drawled to a halt, leaving her story interrupted. Commander Rebka waited patiently for her to finish the sentence.

"I…" she began and then stopped. She went to speak again and then stopped a second time. "I'm still having trouble with this," she said finally.

"Who was it? Some one we knew? Some one from an old case?"

"I…" she said again. "I'm going to have another cup of coffee. You?"

He looked momentarily puzzled. "Yeah," he agreed dubiously.

She climbed from behind her desk and stepped around it. He handed her the cup.

"So who was it?" he asked.

She stopped at the door and turned back to answer him. "That's the wrong question. You should be asking what was it?" She closed the door behind her to let him consider the answer to that question.

It was going to be a good day after all, she decided. She marched to the kitchen in a much-improved state of mind.

*

Despite all that she had read during the flight from Washington, and the secretive nature of O'Neill's behaviour throughout their time together, it was only at that moment that Sarah Mackenzie knew that this situation that she had found herself in was not only real, but also deadly serious. Oh, and slightly to the left of left field, in fact it might be standing in the car-park outside the ground it was so far to the left of the pitcher's mound.

It was time to stop laughing down her sleeve at their self-important posturing and time to accept that they might not be the crackpots that she believed they were. Laughing hysterically might not be out of place, she decided. In fact that had a wonderful attraction to it. She could burst into gales of hysterical laughter and maybe they would take her away, after dressing her in a jacket with long sleeves and buttons that fastened down the back. That was a nice idea, she could do with a long rest, somewhere peaceful, with tranquil views and padded walls.

In her mind there was a disorienting lurch, she finally let go of the notion that she was about to meet a Russian so that they could negotiate. No, that was not on the agenda at all. Not one little bit.

For a moment she thought she was having a stroke, but no such luck. It was simply her head draining of blood pressure. She didn't faint, but only through an exercise of will. 

No it was not a Russian, or an Israeli or a Kuwaiti who was waiting for her in the conference room. She was going to meet someone else entirely.

Nothing would have proved that the stargate was not simply an interesting research program, using up vast amounts of Pentagon dispensed taxes, more thoroughly than the sight that General Hammond's team presented to her at that moment. The stargate was real. It was…It was… not just a way to put every expert in every field from Aardvark adenoids to Zebra testicles onto the payroll and make work for them so that they don't become Greenpeace activists or some of the kind of commie subversive. (I guess that must be a legacy of electing a Bush to the White-house again. The USA may well be the one place in the world where the majority of citizens in a genuine democracy (sort of) can claim; 'don't blame me I didn't vote for him', truthfully.) Democracy is an interesting concept, especially the way it is executed in the western World. Once every three, four or five years (depending on where this exercise is conducted) the people get to chose from a very select field just who will be their dictator for the next three, four or five years (strike out which ever is not applicable). Sort of like totalitarianism with the dictators taking turns. It is so much more dignified than the way it's conducted in places where the country name includes the words 'Democratic' or 'Republic.' Some times you get a place like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they have both words in the country name, and you can guarantee that the election of a new government involves casting your vote with little streamlined lead pellets, and the swinging vote probably uses a machete.

We digress, back to the story. The stargate was the means by which the Delegate was able to come to meet with the representatives of the United States Military. His trip was somewhat too long to have been conducted using commercial jet travel. In fact if we start to add up his frequent flier entitlements we need the services of Cooper's and Lybrand before we get to far into the task.

Sarah Mackenzie thought she understood the term déjà vu. Now she fully understood the term for the first time in her life. The most disorienting aspect of the Delegate's appearance was the overwhelming familiarity of it. It was such a familiar sight that it could actually be termed a stereotype. 

The Delegate was small and grey. It stood barely a metre and a half tall. It was naked, and obviously had no external gender specific identifications. Gender might not actually be relevant to the Delegate Mackenzie realised. The head that sat atop that frail body was oversized, with enormous almond shaped black eyes that stared unblinkingly out from an oversized skull. The face surrounding the eyes was too small; the nose was almost an afterthought. It amounted to, well it was little more than a couple of slots to allow the passage of air. The mouth was small prissy and virtually lipless.

"Colonel Sarah Mackenzie," General Hammond intoned. "Meet Odin." 

Odin presented a hand with three very long thin fingers. It hovered in the air waiting for Mackenzie to shake it.

*

"You are kidding me," Harmon Rebka said to Sarah Mackenzie, over the lip of his coffee cup. If he wasn't careful he was in danger of pouring it down his chin. In his current state he might not notice the damage.

"I'm not joking, Harm," Sarah Mackenzie said. She wore her most earnest expression. The unfortunate part of wearing such a serious expression is that it looks comical by itself. "I am deadly serious."

Harm managed not to laugh by the expedient of biting the inside of his mouth. This is a sure fired way to avoid laughing. It actually hurts like hell. "An alien?" he managed to ask finally. "Not just any old alien, but a genuine bug-eyed grey abductee story type alien."

"The very one," she said and nodded. "Like straight out of the National Inquirer."

"Did you see Agent K or Agent J?" Harm asked. He managed to get the question out without smiling around the lip of his cup, and managed not to spill coffee on himself.

Mackenzie was elsewhere. "What?"

"You know the Men in Black," he said. The confusion on her face prompted him to say, "MIB, movie starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones… protecting humanity from the scum of the…Never mind."

"This is real Harm," she turned that look on him again. This time it wasn't funny.

He held up his hands in mock surrender. "Hey I'm listening."

"Hmm," She sipped once from her cup. The coffee was still warm. She had expected it to have cooled down to the point where it was disgusting given how much time she had spent talking so far.

"Carry on I'm all ears."

"That's what your girlfriends say I hear."

"Ha Ha, the story…"

*

The alien that General Hammond had introduced as Odin had done something so incongruously unexpected that Sarah Mackenzie forgot her manners for a second. She stared at the outstretched hand. Her mind was blank. Samantha Carter nudged her elbow and Mackenzie realised that she was supposed to shake the alien's hand. She took it and was surprised at how firm the grip was from such a frail looking creature. Its flesh was surprisingly cold.

Her mind was going around in little circles. The logo on their shirt was not for show. It really was a return to sender pieces of addressing. Funny how your mind tries to concentrate on the minute when the really big picture gets a bit overwhelming.

"Odin represents the Asgard on earth," General Hammond said.

Mackenzie sort of free associated her way from, Asgard references, to the name Odin and then finally to the way the Norse society of hundreds of years ago had…Oh my…

"The team who will go through with you is the SG-1 team," Mackenzie heard General Hammond say. She realised that she had missed quite a bit of the conversation while her mind had been elsewhere. She hoped none of it was important, somehow she knew that was a vain hope. Everything in this conversation was going to be important, she could tell that.

She shook her head and cleared her mind as best she could under the circumstances. "I'm still trying to catch up here," she apologised.

"Take your time Colonel," Hammond offered. "While we have lunch you can meet the rest of the team." He beckoned to a group of humans who stood unrecognised behind the slight figure of Odin. "This is Daniel Jackson." He indicted a man of slightly more than average height, even featured as though he was a television presenter rather than a member of the marines. He wore glasses that were formed from a fine wire frame and offset his features well. His dark sandy hair was cropped reasonably short. His eyes were alive with more than the normal level of Marine intelligence, there was none of the guarded looks that military personnel exhibited either. She found herself looking at his shoulders. With a start she realised that he had no rank insignia. Then she realised where she had heard the name before. It had been scattered throughout the file she had read earlier in the day.

"He is our civilian representative," continued General Hammond. "Daniel's work on the translation of the runes around the stargate led to the controlled use of the thing in the first place."

"Translation?" she asked. Then it dawned on her, she had read so much that she had not had the chance to digest it yet, the stargate was not a human creation; it was a human discovery. Of course! The world wobbled a bit more while she made another conceptual shift.

Let me try and summarise this for myself, Mackenzie decided. There were aliens out there in the wider universe who looked like the Asgards and who were always being accused of kidnapping people from those dinky little mid-western towns so the tabloid papers could make their awful headlines. Those rumours always seemed to abound in the…She put a halt to that line of reasoning. They were in Wyoming, she reminded herself, right in the heart of that part of the country where those rumours always seemed to originate. Oh dear… Then if they were true, then…

Daniel Jackson was holding out his hand as though expecting her to take it. She shook it absently and mouthed a few vague, and hopefully, appropriate pleasantries. She was still dealing with the idea that the National Inquirer was accurately reporting real events. That would suggest that the rest of the papers, those who ignored the alien abduction stories were probably being pressured into silence by the might of the military and the official secrets legislation. Mackenzie felt the approach of an on-rushing headache of biblical proportions.

"We expect you to have lots of questions," Carter said. "Things are reasonably urgent though. A lot of them can be answered as we go."

"As we go…Where?"

"With Odin."

I think I missed something important there, Mackenzie told herself. If I ask them to, I wonder if they wouldn't mind pausing so she could rewind this conversation and listen to it again. She was sure she had missed a great deal of it.

She thought she had a handle on what Carter meant this time. "You want me to go through that thing?" Mackenzie guessed. She thought there was an uncomfortably obvious note of anxiety in her words. It might not be all that obvious to the other's but in her experience, that jump of an octave and half in the last syllable was a dead give away. It had only dawned on her at that moment that she was expected to Go Through The Stargate To An Other Star. That was what these people expected of her. Her mouth was suddenly very dry. Now where was that long sleeved jacket when you needed it?

A good scream might not go astray at this moment.

"Yes, it's where our hostage-to-fate is at the moment," Hammond explained cryptically.

"Where? What? Hostage to fate? Oh the FBI agent who's…oh sh…"

"With the Asgards…"

"OK. I think I get this."

"Our FBI agent is with the Asgard, yes."

"As in Norse Gods?" She just had to clear that up. Maybe it was just the name they had applied out of a twisted sense of humour? She could imagine Jack O'Neill finding something like that to be funny. With a name like Odin what did she really expect? 

"Yes," said Daniel Jackson. "It's not just a name we gave them in tribute to the Old Norse Gods, they actually were the source of their theology. The ancient Norse, actually interacted with the Asgard, Odin was the leader of the outpost that monitored Humanity at that time and…Are you alright?"

"No I think I'm suffering from a lack of blood sugar and a really big conceptual over load."

"We should start lunch," General Hammond suggested. 

"And sit down," agreed Mackenzie fervently.

The delegation took seats amid the standard wheels on carpet rustling while their chairs were moved about. Mackenzie took a seat part way along one side of the table. She helped herself to a sandwich while she decided what to say. Everyone at the table noticed that she took a cheese and gherkin. She must have been seriously stressed because everyone knows that no one eats those things. They're always left on the plate at the end of the conference. You could put them in boxes and sent them to Rwanda and they would sit on the docks and go rotten before anyone could possibly get hungry enough to eat one. It went straight into her mouth, got bitten chewed and swallowed while the rest of the delegation watched on in stunned amazement.

"Oh…" She thought for a moment. What could she say to these people after that revelation about the Norse Gods? She decided to plough forward. Perhaps her mind could catch up at a later date. "Which star are we talking about?" she decided was the best question she could ask at this moment.

"We don't have a name for it," Samantha explained while she selected sandwiches of her own. She pushed the cheese and gherkin things away and looked once more at the half-eaten one on Mackenzie's plate. She shook her head. "It's not in our Galaxy," Carter said in such a deceptively matter of fact way. "It's in…Is there something wrong?"

"No, no. I. I…" Mackenzie shook her head. This was getting ridiculous. Not in our galaxy? Oh boy…

"The Asgards are all over the stargate network," Carter explained. "They're one of the few races with a real understanding of how the things work. Until recently they had an outpost not too far from here, for research mostly. 

"The Goa'uld overran the outpost of theirs," O'Neill explained cryptically, "and the Asgard's research team was subdued, circumvented and 'blended'." He smiled cynically. "The Goa'uld installed their symbionts in the Asgard personnel. It's a new problem for them. Gave them quite a fright."

Sarah Mackenzie was suffering from a bad case of information overload. "The what?" she asked; she was already dreading the answer. 

She took a sandwich and began eating. At least she would cure one reason for the sick feeling in her stomach. Her discomfort might have been caused by eating a cheese-and-gherkins sandwich, we don't know, and have no way to be sure because nobody has ever eaten one in the past so we have no way to judge their effect. It is unlikely, they were all fresh ingredients and there was no reason to suggest that she may have been suffering from salmonella poisoning or bilious problems. The nagging sick feeling in her stomach is probably related to the face that she hasn't eaten for a long time. Of course it might have something to do with the development of a totally new and unexpected ulcer. Curing that other one might take a little more effort and some assistance from a doctor.

"The Goa'uld?" Asked Jack O'Neill around a mouthful of bread laced with processed meat-like substances and processed cheese. He then proceeded to answer his own question. "They're a bad lot of alien parasites floating about this galaxy. They make a lot of trouble for the rest of us who are using the stargate network."

I wish I hadn't asked, Mackenzie thought to herself.

"They are semi-intelligent parasites that get by, by having a symbiotic relationship with slave hosts," Jackson explained. "Part of what they do is borrow the neural capacity of the host, making the symbiont a good deal brighter than the little reptilian thing is, to start with."

Seriously should never have asked, thought Mackenzie. You can stop now. Too much information.

"They were the aliens that Erik Von Danniken postulated in his Charriot's of the Gods thing about twenty years ago. The ones who were responsible for building the pyramids of Egypt, and that sort of stuff. 

She couldn't help herself. Before she could get control of her mouth, the question was out before she could bite it's head off. "What're they like?" she asked.

"Show her Teal'c." O'Neill pointed to the dark hued man lurking at the end of the table. He pushed away from the table and climbed to his feet. He stepped forward and revealed a distinctive gold tattoo embossed into the skin of his forehead. His head was shaven. His face was regular apart from the most exaggerated lips she had seen on a human being. They looked like a plastic surgeon had been just a trifle too enthusiastic in their development. They made Mick Jagger look positively skeletal.

Of course they had one of those here as well, Mackenzie thought. How stupid of me not to realise that. D'oh.

The large Black man had sat quietly through the dissertation without saying a word. His only comments had been the occasional editorial comment conveyed by a single raised eyebrow that punctuated the revelations made by the SGC team. 

O'Neill pushed away from the table so that the man he had called Teal'c stood revealed before her. He pulled the hem of his shirt from the waistband of his trousers and began lifting it to show his abdomen.


	7. Chapter 7

Mac paused and shook her head and then rubbed her eyes. Harmon waited for her to continue. She said nothing for a moment, just stared into space.

The delay got the better of him. "What did he show you?"

She shook her head. "I'm not sure I can describe it to you."

"Try," he suggested. "What was it that he showed you?"

"Well," she began, she frowned and then tried again. "There was a little snake thing living inside of him. It poked it's head out of a cross-shaped wound in his stomach." She illustrated with a couple of slashing motions of her finger beneath her ribs.

"You're joking?" Harm asked.

"No," she shook her head. "I wish I was."

*

Teal'c tucked his shirt back into his trousers. Mackenzie spent a few moments gathering her thoughts into some sort of coherent order. No that is the next step, first she had to have some thoughts to put into order, right at this moment she was having no thoughts at all.

"I know this is a lot to take in under such pressing circumstances," apologised General Hammond. "I just wish we had more time to let you absorb all of this."

Boy, that was an understatement.

Outside the conference room, in the operations room they had so recently stood, the counter above the operator's heads approached zero. An alarm sounded. It rung out in the conference room, interrupting their discussion.

Somehow lunch had disappeared. Mackenzie realised that she wasn't hungry any more and had cleared her plate. She stared at the empty plate for a moment and wondered how that might have happened while she wasn't watching. "How does the stargate …?" Sarah Mackenzie asked slightly distracted by the pace at which this whole exercise seemed to be occurring.

"Come along and watch it work," suggested Samantha Carter. Her enthusiasm for the oversize hula-hoop was like a schoolgirl with a new toy. Sarah Mackenzie followed along in her wake like a dazed puppy. They left the confines of the conference room and strode back into the operations centre once again. This time Mackenzie was ready to look at the place, actually try to understand what she was seeing.

There was a bunch of technicians seated in a loose semicircular arrangement working at computers. Each of them had a headset microphone attached to their ears and watched the display before them intently. A huge mimic panel displayed what Sarah Mackenzie took for a star map, displayed the path through which the stargate traveller must be moving.

The computer operator's demeanour conveyed an air of expectancy to Mackenzie's unfamiliar perceptions. In a few cases fingers danced on the keyboards.

"Incoming traveller," Intoned one of the technicians fatuously, I mean like there was anyone in that room who didn't already know that the gate was being used. 

Mackenzie walked across to the window looking over the stargate installation and watched what was happening. For some reason there seemed to be steam issuing from something, like a leak. There seemed no reason for this to be happening, but no one seemed concerned.

"We have a valid GDO code received. I have confirmation that it is SG-6 sir."

"Open the iris," General Hammond ordered.

Mackenzie watched while the aperture that covered the hole in the centre of the stargate slid open with a sound like a dozen swords crossing.

The operations centre crowd became deathly silent, waiting. For one mad impulsive moment, Mackenzie wanted to shout out "Boo!!!" at the top of her voice, just to see what happened. She didn't do it of course. It was not good military behaviour and that sort of stuff had been knocked out of her during the last few years. Now back in her university days things might have been a bit different.

Below the mezzanine operations floor, the heavy stone ring rotated slowly within the confines of its stone shroud; finally drawing to a halt with a precision that was impressive in a machine of that size. Something went click with a solid sound that is characteristic of small stone hitting large stone.

At equal intervals around the circular stone structure, the builders had arranged stone chevrons that were able to move into and out of mesh with the ring. This motion was executed with a similar machine like precision to that exhibited by the rotation of the ring. One of those had just locked into place while Mackenzie watched.

"It looks like stone," Mackenzie said. "It isn't of course."

"You're right, it isn't," Samantha Carter explained. "If anyone measured the density of the material from which it had been fashioned," Samantha Carter continued, "they would have realised that it should have left a sizeable dent in space-time. A negative dent," she said and smiled as if that statement might have made sense. "Physicists call the phenomena a wormhole. It's one of the mathematical extrapolations we can make from quantum physical mathematics. It suggested that exotic matter, that is matter with a negative energy density, could be used to stabilise the boundaries of a wormhole in space-time. The thing you see on the floor out there is fashioned from that very type of substance."

"So we have the knowledge to be able to build something like that?" Mackenzie asked.

"Nooo," Carter said slowly. "We have just about enough knowledge to use the think like a chimpanzee using a typewriter. As for building it, we wouldn't know the first thing about how to fashion the material that the ring was made from."

"You're a physicist," Sarah Mackenzie guessed. It wasn't a hard puzzle, only a physicist could come out with that sort of rubbish with such conviction. I mean these are the people who think particles that might be a wave and might be a discrete particle (on it's own than confusion says it all) and when they needed to name the properties of the wave/particle they came up with names like charm and strangeness. And they want us to take them seriously and give them lots of money to play with those toys of theirs. When the Luddite men from Greenpeace make their mark in the world those sorts of gobbledegook physicists are going to be the first people consigned to the place with the rubberised walls.

Samantha Carter nodded. "Hence my involvement in this team. Her gesture encapsulated the four people who made up the SG-1 exploration team.

Beneath the control room, the ring rotated again, slowly, it spun in the opposite direction this time. A rumble like a grinding wheel lazily crushing cornhusks accompanied its majestic progress. It was a sound that filled the otherwise expectantly silent cavern with a new and dangerous foreboding. 

Almost unnoticed in the cavern, a group of military liveried men and women - each adorned with protective clothing, and each armed with offensive weaponry - watched the progress of the ring expectantly.

The ponderous rotation and counter rotation continued remorselessly until a sixth hieroglyphic from among those engraved into the circumference of the giant stony toroid, dropped into place, forming a pattern that ancient Egyptians might have recognised. The key mechanism surrounding the giant circular stone locked with a final robust click. 

There was a pregnant pause; it endured just long enough to lend an air of expectancy to proceedings. It was the sort of precisely fashioned pause that you would expect from any Creator who had a flair for the dramatic. 

From within the ring, a burst of cloud rocketed a distance of almost five metres into the room. It swirled malignantly for a second before it retreated equally quickly and formed a shimmering interface that remained suspended inside the stone ring. It looked like the surface of a swimming pool, except it was vertical, and didn't slosh on the floor. The whole event looked like someone had set off a grenade in a jacuzzi, except it all happened sideways.

The silhouette of a man stepped through the interface and surveyed the scene that confronted him. He was followed seconds later by a second, a third and finally a fourth man. The event horizon closed with a similarly malignant gesture and the iris slid closed.

They lurched to a halt on the near side of the interface and then proceeded to march down the metallic ramp. Their footsteps echoed around the cavern with typical hollow reverberations that all these sorts of scene demand in any good narrative. It is a testimony to his self-esteem that the expectancy in the cavern's atmosphere did not cause them a flinch of concern. They didn't seemed to be in the least phased by the armed reception committee that Mackenzie had noticed for the first time. More than half a dozen AK-47s were aimed directly at the new arrivals.

"Colonel Makepeace?" questioned General Hammond.

"All present and clear sir," called the one who had led the men through the orifice. 

"Permission to stand down from alert status?" asked the technicians who seemed to have all the talking to do. 

"Stand down," ordered General Hammond. Probably just as well, Mackenzie thought, that they were so cautious. You never knew what might be out there.

O'Neill stood behind Mackenzie throughout the stargate demonstration. He had said barely a hand full of sentences to her in the five hours they had been together and each of them had involved some element of removing the carpet from beneath her feet. He did it again with his next sentence. "The Asgard/Goa'uld have been conducting experiments here on Earth," he said suddenly, filling the silence that had ambushed the gathering before it became oppressive. "Have been for about fifty years, perhaps since the second world war. We've only just found out about it. They have been working with human collaborators, some of them within the Department of Defence we think, among other things, key Foreign Service agencies throughout the world."

He shook his head and continued staring through the window at the stargate. The iris had slid shut again, closing the threatening absence of anything in the open gate maw.

"Strangely enough," O'Neill continued in a vaguely wistful tone, "the FBI have been keeping a file on unexplained phenomena. Apparently it was a sort of a hobby of J. Edgar Hoover's. That department looks after particularly peculiar deaths as well. Over the last few years, they came up with enough information on the conspirators to be able to find them, not enough to lay any criminal charges, of course, but enough to locate who they were. Their discovery must have caused an enormous ruckus in their ranks. From what we can make out, there were, apparently, many infiltrations within the FBI as well.

"This whole mess with the captured agent came about because he was captured by the Goa'uld. It's kind of ironic really, he could just as easily have waited and got a better result. The stupid part of this whole mess was what happened next. The Asgards were also on the case and just weeks later they acted as well. It might have saved everyone a lot of trouble if this guy had been just a little bit dumber. The Asgards would have come in and cleaned up their mess and gone about their business."

Sarah Mackenzie stared through the glass at the stargate. It was sitting resplendid in its cavern, looking remarkably impotent now. It might have been an ancient Egyptian carving in stone. A few stirrings behind her reminded her that she was not here as a spectator, she had an actual job to do. The conference group began making their way back into the conference room. 

For some reason Odin had not come out with them to the operations room, Mackenzie noted. Probably the equivalent of going to watch a bunch of chimpanzees playing with a stick that they found on the ground. Our activities around the stargate was probably only of interest to an anthropologist studying primitive life-forms, Mackenzie thought bitterly. She might have been put out if she realised that the Asgards didn't have that high an opinion of humans. After all we were the ones who mistook an understaffed scientific outpost for Godhead. We would probably do it again tomorrow if were given the chance and sufficiently high technology. (Or perhaps not, remember the Cult following David Caresh, or the Jonestown massacre. You don't need hight tech, you just need a good line of chat and a few believers with big sticks, just in case.) 

Odin rose from its position on one of the seats adorning the conference room and greeted their return with the same impassive gaze that Mackenzie had seen the last time they had met. Mackenzie wondered for a moment why the briefing was being conducted by the humans and not by the alien. It was the alien's story surely. Maybe it couldn't talk.

The smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the air. A percolator sat on the bench to one side of the conference room and O'Neill staged a mock race with Jackson to be the first to sample it. There followed the usual ritual around the coffee machine, while each of the participants holds their cup out to the leader of the ceremony who dispenses the elixir to all in measured doses. I'm sure you've all seen it done.

Odin watched on and marvelled at this latest manifestation of anthropological interest.

Sarah Mackenzie motioned for O'Neill to continue with the story as soon as she was supplied with her cup. He seemed intent on measuring the appropriate quantity of sugar and needed to concentrate intently on that important task.

"In the resulting dispute," supplied Daniel Jackson taking up the conversation as though nothing had changed, "between the official Asgard group and the renegade Goa'uld infested group, some of the renegade Asgards were subdued by the Asgard assault force. And after the situation was resolved, they liberated the FBI agent. Sort of."

"Sort of?" queried Mackenzie. She needed to sit down before she fell down she realised. She pulled a chair out and leant against the back of it heavily.

"Touch hard to explain," explained O'Neill. He took a long sip from his cup and released a heartfelt sigh. "We're getting there. Just hang in for a bit longer."

The members of SG-1 systematically pulled chairs from beneath the table and sank into the leather upholstery. It was a welcome break for Sarah Mackenzie, leaning against the chair was not doing it for her; she needed to sit down, desperately. She only realised at that moment just how much she had been forced to absorb. She followed suit with what she hoped was not undue haste.

"That's where you come in," Added Samantha Carter, she leant forward, leaning her elbows on the table and waving her right hand about for emphasis. She pointed vaguely in Odin's direction. "They want you to come back with them and act as his advocate. They don't know how badly knocked around he might be, the experience must have had some impact, and they need some one to help them find out just how much."

That sounded like a lawsuit pending to Mackenzie, or her life's work. She wasn't sure which.

"They don't want to judge him by their ethical standards," General Hammond added. "They're too alien. They want to judge him by our own ethical standards and that's why they need you. To assess his responses and to determine how they stand up in relation to acceptable human guidelines."

Sarah Mackenzie followed this tag team briefing with an air of growing dislocation, as though she felt the world receding from her at an alarming rate. "Oh, you have got to be kidding, right? They want me to tell them if he's OK. What did I do to deserve this?"

"Do you know what the reward is for a job well done Colonel?" asked General Hammond.

"Another harder job?" answered Mackenzie with another question of her own.

"Consider this your hardest, new job."

"Great. Do you have any doubts about my ability to do this?"

"No," answered General Hammond seriously. "Do you?"

"What happens if…" she began and then trailed off so she could think about this a bit.

"You would be amazed at what their technology can achieve."

Across the table from her Odin nodded his oversized head. Well that might have answered the question about their speaking.


	8. Chapter 8

Sarah Mackenzie watched for a reaction on Harm's face. He looked stuffed, as though unsure how he should react to this story. She took another sip from her coffee cup and licked her lips before continuing. Harm seemed awfully subdued. He was normally a good deal more animated than he appeared to be today.

"What's the matter?" she asked him. "You would normally have a lot to say in any story I told by now."

"Still trying to work out what is going on here."

"Don't try too hard it gets worse."

"Oh I have no doubt that it does, none at all.

*

Sarah Mackenzie stood up from her position at the conference table, rubbed her eyes as though trying to wipe out the visual memory of what she had just witnessed. If seeing was believing, then perhaps not seeing was not believing. She found herself standing by the window and looking into the chamber where the huge stone ring stood. She reached out and touched the glass. On the other side of this thin glass wall, a small army of technicians calmly operated a device that could transport her across the galaxy. A couple of hours earlier she had not even been aware that such a thing was possible, let alone done here in the USA. She looked closely at the stargate and shook her head. If things went the way these people thought it would, that was exactly what was going to happen in a short time. She would be sent across space to another galaxy. To visit an alien world that the National Inquirer had been reporting as real for years, she wasn't dealing with this at all well. No she was going to take that back, she wasn't dealing with it at all. Not well, not at all.

Below her, she watched the four men who had come through a gate a few moments earlier. They were marshalled at the base of the ramp leading down from the gate and had begun speaking with the reception team. She watched while they gathered their gear together and marched straight beneath her feet.

She struggled to believe that any of this could be real. Only a few hours earlier she had been preparing to defend a corporal against a desertion charge because he had been silly enough to fall head over heels in lust with a girl during a shore leave. That was the way of the majority of the cases that came before her.

And then to be faced with this…

It boggled the mind. (And did horrible things to the intestines).

She wondered for a moment what Harmon would do if he were faced with this sort of choice. Knowing him he would leap at the chance and go Gung Ho into the breach. So that was definitely the wrong thing to do then. Was it possible to saunter forward slowly? She somehow doubted that it was possible.

Was that her role in all this? Was that what she was expected to do? It had a ring of half truth (or maybe three-quarter truth). But which bit was real and which bit was bulldust, and how can you tell?

And what about the political repercussions of this little affair? 

That was an angle she hadn't considered until this moment. The level of security inherent in something of this magnitude must be enormous. For a moment she felt proud of the fact that she was selected for this mission.

And then it dawned on her. 

The confidence being displayed in her by the line of command and the political power inherent in being part of the inner circle like this was a sword that had two edges. Newton's laws of motion applied to the momentum of human politics as well. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The opportunity that she had been given here had the same capacity to backfire as it had to provide momentum to her career. She was being handed enough rope to see if she hanged her self.

Seated at the table, the Stargate Command (boy didn't that bring with it some connotations now) awaited her decision.

She turned toward them, heaved one long sigh and then said; "OK," softly; and then added more loudly. "I'll do it."

*

Harmon Rebka regarded Sarah Mackenzie over the lip of his coffee cup. As hard as he tried he couldn't pick any sign that she was winding him up. It couldn't be real, he was sure of that but at this stage the punch line escaped him. 

Well there was one way to short circuit that process. "You are kidding me," he chided. His smile turned secretive. "This is all a big wind up isn't it?"

She regarded him seriously, the small lines of a frown creasing her brow. "No it's all deadly serious. I'm not sure how much I can tell you. It's…"

"Bizarre?" he suggested. "The word you're looking for is bizarre."

"Yes. That is sort of what I wanted to say."

He wasn't going to bite again. Let her have her fun for a bit longer then. "Hmm," he prompted.

She waved an upturned hand at him, as though to say, well you know how it is. "You can see why I've been tramping around here all morning like my brain was replaced by a wad of cotton wool," she explained.

"I'm not entirely sure it hasn't. Perhaps those aliens…"

She smiled grimly. "That would sort of prove my point don't you think?"

He nodded. Her brain wasn't completely absent, just the bit that looked after delusion management. "Carry on." He waved an airy gesture with his half empty cup.

*

The four members of SG-1 led Sarah Mackenzie and the alien they called Odin down from the mezzanine floor and into the main cavern. Their boot steps echoed into the far corners of the cavern sinisterly. She found herself looking around at the infrastructure that supported the gate, at the marines that guarded the portal from the scum of the universe. How useful would an AK-47 be against an alien that could create the gate technology? She had no idea, but it obviously made them feel good to parade around in those camouflage uniforms, toting those guns. They might as well shout boo from behind the protection of a doorframe for all the difference it would make.

They led her up to the ramp, but not onto it. She wondered at the hesitation for a moment.

General Hammond's voice echoed through the cavern, amplified by the PA system so that it boomed ominously. He could host talk back radio she thought. 'Just dial 555-WINGE and we'll take called number eleven.' "Stand by," he called into the gate cavern.

The iris sealing the stargate portal, spiralled from it's engagement over the wormhole (doing the actual job of protecting us from the scum of the universe, those snakes in the nervous system, the Goa'uld) with a sound like knives being sharpened. Their outward passage revealed a gaping hole inside the rune decorated stone ring. Hardly the most inspiring of revelations, Mackenzie decided.

The ring rotated. Mackenzie heard an accompanying rumble, like the worlds densest grinding wheel rolling over a load of cornhusks. It came in to the audio processing centres of her brain through the big bones of her skeleton, rather than the little bones of her inner ear. The sound was now malignantly amplified by their proximity, no longer protected by the damping of distance and walls. It filled the otherwise expectantly silent cavity with a new and dangerous foreboding. 

One of the chevrons around the periphery of the gate twitched. It locked into place.

"Chevron one engaged," commented an unfamiliar voice from the PA. 

The wheel accelerated again, rotated in the opposite direction.

"What is it doing?" Mackenzie turned and asked Carter.

"It's dialling the address of the stargate that we will be heading out to visit. The first three chevrons represent the address of this gate, distance from the centre of the galaxy and then vertical and horizontal angle. The second triplet cover the same data for the destination."

"So you don't have a speed dial system worked out yet?"

"We don't, but the Goa'uld and the ancients and the Asgards and the Tok'ra all have."

"Chevron two engaged," interrupted the voice from the PA.

"Isn't the place where we are going outside of this galaxy? That was what you said wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"Then there must be more to the dialling process than you've just described. It only referenced stars in this galaxy."

"Right again. Odin brought his own dialling control system with him. They won't let us use the same thing that they do. They only let us use the one that we developed ourselves."

The rotation continued remorselessly until a third hieroglyphic, from among those engraved into the circumference of the giant stony toroid, dropped into place, forming a pattern that ancient Egyptians might have recognised. 

A fourth chevron locked, and then a fifth. A sixth chevron dropped. All the while the process was commented on, uselessly, by the control room operator.

The key mechanism surrounding the giant circular stone locked with a robust click. 

"Control software off line," announced the voice over the PA.

A palpable air of expectation was felt throughout the cavern. Sarah Mackenzie was uncomfortably aware of the power that was being subdued here. Subdued by what they all admitted was a jury-rigged chicken wire and sticky-tape solution cobbled together by a bunch of boffins and then drowned in jargon to top it off.

"Chevron seven engaged," announced the voice from the PA.

There came the pregnant pause that Mackenzie expected.

She restrained herself from leaping in surprise when the burst of cloud rocketed five metres into the room; covering almost the entire length of the approach ramp in a fraction of a second. Like before, it swirled malignantly for a second before it retreated equally quickly to become a shimmering interface suspended inside the stone ring. Even up this close it looked like the surface of a swimming pool, except it was vertical.

"OK," muttered Mackenzie. "That was suitably dramatic."

"Coming," suggested Jack O'Neill.

"Wouldn't miss it for the world," she lied. Her bladder remained un-voided by an effort of will that only she understood.


	9. Chapter 9

Colonel Jack O'Neill strode up the ramp and stepped through the event horizon. 

He disappeared. 

The alien presence of Odin accompanied him through the gate.

Sarah Mackenzie followed behind them, stepping gingerly up the ramp. She teased the event horizon. It rippled like the surface of a waterbed at her touch. She watched the movement, her face creased into a bemused expression. 

"There really isn't anything to worry about," Samantha Carter said from immediately behind her. Mackenzie had been so engrossed in her examination of the gate interface that she had not noticed the other woman's approach.

"What's it like?" MacKenzie asked. Her voice sounded tiny to her own ears, dwarfed by the enormity of what she faced.

"Like the worlds worst roller coaster ride," Carter suggested. "The further you travel the worst the disorientation. It's related to a dislocation that your consciousness experiences when the stargate disconnects your consciousness from the surroundings. Human consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. Quantum physicists have postulated that for a while. It goes some way toward proving a basis for theology." She shrugged expressively. "This is a long trip. As long as any we have tried in the past."

Daniel Jackson and Teal'c stepped around the two women and through the cloak of the event horizon. Since the conference where they had dumped all this on Mackenzie, Jackson had exchanged the elegant glasses he had worn for a much more robust pair. Mackenzie wondered if the ride was rough enough to justify stronger glasses frames.

Samantha waved her arm in invitation.

For a moment Mackenzie entertained the paranoid notion that she was being pushed forward by a bizarre military suicide cult. It must be irrational, she decided. But that made the feeling no less real.

She took control of herself and stepped up to the gate. She stepped through…

Samantha Carter stepped through just slightly behind her.

Mackenzie endured a gut wrenching ride like some sadistic bastard had tacked the Universe's worst roller coaster design onto the far side of the portal. Her frantic passage was accompanied by a visual track that was intended to heighten the impression that one was about to look at one's breakfast again really soon. 

She felt as though she was stretched until she was the length of the universe, flattened until she was the width of the universe, crushed to a pin point as though she were her own little black hole in space, and then spat out through an extrusion press.

Then she re-appeared somewhere else in space-time, only a few moments (or eternities, depending on your scholastic allegiances) later. 

She staggered, almost fell to the floor and struggled for a moment to retain the contents of her stomach.

"That trans-spatial ride is still a wild trip," Daniel Jackson told her. "Even after all these years spent crossing the portal, it never gets much better." He reached down and helped her to stand under her own steam. She wobbled for a moment before regaining her balance, leaning heavily on his shoulder. His face looked owlish behind those heavy-framed glasses.

Samantha Carter came through the gate before Mackenzie recovered her equilibrium. Carter skipped a moment before coming to a halt only a few metres into their destination, away from of the stargate portal. She looked down at something in her hand and then wiped her hair from her eyes. She smiled at Mackenzie in encouragement.

Mackenzie's nausea passed reasonably quickly and she managed to take some notice of the people and things that surrounded her.

There seemed to be no sign of Odin or O'Neill.


	10. Chapter 10

Harm looked at her as though he might be about to make a disbelieving snort. He strained himself with a visible effort. "So what was the ride like?" he asked.

"Like she said it would be. It was the world's worst roller coaster. There were lights that stretched and I was sure at one stage I could taste the colour green." She shook her head, sending her hair into a frantic little orbit.

"So what was the aliens home world like?"

"I didn't see much of it. I remember the gravity. That was the give-away. We really were on another planet. I felt light, you know. I had a real spring in my step. The light was different and there were these smells that I couldn't recognise, but it was the lack of gravity that brought it home."

"What, like about half of what you were used to?"

"Not that much. Perhaps three quarters."

"Well, what did it look like?"

*

They had emerged inside a corridor. The walls seemed to glow with a light of their own. There were no shadows. Sarah Mackenzie had trouble with the glare. The iris in her eyes wouldn't close enough to dull it down to levels where she could see properly.

She shielded her eyes and tried to make out the details of her surroundings.

Daniel Jackson and Teal'c looked around, examining the details of the corridor and the Asgard stargate with an intensity that Sarah Mackenzie found hard to understand. Carter held up an instrument like a hand held light meter. She looked at it a few times and tutted to herself. She placed it into a pocket sewn into the piping of her trousers.

O'Neill and Odin returned to the gate location, walking along the corridor from the opposite direction to the placement of the gate. They appeared to Mackenzie's dazzled eyes to materialise from the glare.

"He's ready for us," Odin said. It was the first words Mackenzie had heard him say. She was sure he wouldn't be able to speak English, and was surprised that he could. "I am not speaking," he explained as though reading her mind. "I am just making contact with your speech centres and placing data into your neurological audio processing centres."

"OK," said Mackenzie, to just about everybody present.

"His name is Fox Mulder," explained Odin. "As far as we can make out he has been trapped with the Goa'uld for almost a year."

"That's terrible," commented Mackenzie.

Odin nodded; a remarkably human gesture. "We hope we can recover him. We feel responsible for his plight."

"The FBI have been searching for him pretty thoroughly," O'Neill explained. "We don't let much information out about this. There's an assistant Director of the FBI who found us, or rather a bunch of net nerds who publish an anarchist paper called 'The Lone Gunmen' found us and let him know. Apparently the AD was this guy's boss. Astute fella, picked up on the whole secrecy thing. Only got one bit wrong. He thought we were responsible for the mess this guy's in. Seems someone at the Department of Defence is involved, we just don't know who."

"This is amazing," said Mackenzie in one of her more cunning moments of understatement.

"He's through this way," said Odin's voice in her head, and led them along the corridor and then through a doorway that Mackenzie was sure wasn't there a moment earlier. They entered a room that shared the same characteristic over illumination as the hallway. For a moment Mackenzie envied O'Neill his dark glasses. The only feature visible in the room was an altar that projected from the floor in the middle of the room.

A man in his late thirties was lying on the white altar, dressed in a white t-shirt and jeans. His feet were clad in quality leather lace up boots. All were spotlessly clean. His dark hair was cut into spikes about an inch long. He had pursed lips and a slightly down turned nose.

He appeared to be unconscious. Or dead.

Mackenzie said her thoughts out loud.

"Ah that would be because he is dead," said O'Neill, dead pan. He added the caveat, "sort of," in a much smaller voice.

Mackenzie looked the question at Carter, hoping for (or dreading) elaboration.

"It's a matter of quantum physics," she said uncertainly. "They've locked the state of all of his subatomic particles so the particles can't change their quantum state. That means they have managed a sort of state of suspended-animation."

Mackenzie eyed her off for a moment. "That sounds like science fiction," she observed.

"Have a look around you. Science fact perhaps. We have no idea how they do it. We also have no idea how they manage to maintain that illusion of his presence. He shouldn't look like this."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if his quantum state was locked, then all light that impinges on him would reflect back as though he wasn't there, or it would pass through him without being interfered with by the passage. Our theory suggests that someone in that state would either be a perfect mirror or completely invisible, we don't really know which, and the Asgards are no help. Every time we ask them a question like that they just tilt those oversized heads of theirs to one side and blink at us. We won't get an answer out of them, no matter how hard we try. We're just left with trying to work it out by ourselves. There are arguments about what that," she gestured at the man on the altar, "means in SGC's science forums."

"If he is dead then…"

"Asgard technology," O'Neill explained as if that answer said it all. Perhaps it did for him, Mackenzie thought. After a while magic would start to look real if you kept encountering things like she had endured during the last half day, every day, day in day out for years.

"They copied the quantum signature of his thought processes into a crystalline memory construct," Carter explained, well that was what she though she was doing, "so you could interrogate it."

That explanation made little sense to Mackenzie, but she thought she had a few little bits of it, hear and there. "Is his body alive?"

Carter did not answer. She looked at Odin who had remained silent throughout the explanation, allowing the humans to explain the events in their common language. The Asgards had found that it helped to convey the concepts to let the humans communicate among themselves despite the obvious errors and misinterpretations that Carter was guilty of conveying.

"It could be again," explained Odin. 

"But it isn't now?"

"That is correct."

"How would you reanimate him."

"That is within our capability, but we would only undertake the task if the consciousness that we restored to the physical/biological matrix was a valid one."

"That's what you want me to help you to determine."

"Yes."

"Wouldn't a psychologist be a better choice?"

"We are not interested in the state of his neurological development or his trauma adjustments. We are concerned with his ethical development. We do not want to place a dysfunctional entity into you care."

Mackenzie digested that argument and saw the sense of it. They were planning to leave the counselling to the human specialists, provided the man was well enough to accept the treatment.

She walked around the altar, examining him carefully. He was a relatively tall man, she could tell by the length of his limbs. "I cannot see how all this works," she said. "How can I talk with him? I cannot achieve anything if I can't speak with him."

"He is dreaming," explained Odin. "We will question his dreams. You will interrogate the dreamer."

She looked at him challengingly. "How?"

"You will share his dreams," Odin said cryptically.

"How do I do that?" she asked.


	11. Chapter 11

"This gets better all the time," Harm mocked. He was thoroughly convinced by now that he was having his chain pulled.

Sarah Mackenzie ignored his mocking tone. "You're right," she said seriously. "The best bits are still to come."

"Tell on," he said and gestured toward her as though approving her continuing to spin this story. He drained the last of his coffee from the cup, and desperately wanted another but he wasn't going to miss the end of this story for the world.

*

As far as Sarah Mackenzie was concerned the glowing white room disappeared. She was no longer sprawled on an altar that had grown from the floor for her. She had been transported instantly to somewhere else. 

The glowing white room was replaced by a dingy gloomy place. She tested her impressions, looked around her new surroundings in confusion. This was not what she had expected. Not this total immersion in the experience. She was disconcerted and struggled to regain her composure. She could feel things, not just see them and hear them.

The space was closed, but it felt big for a room, like being inside an auditorium, but it was illuminated by a single spot light. She couldn't see the walls but she was certain they were out there, just beyond the pool of light that illuminated both her and the other man in the room. 

The air was cold. 

She looked down at herself. It was her body; the conclusion coming from all those subliminal clues that she relied on to know her own body space. She wore he JAG uniform, everything was familiar. She almost expected to come through to the sensenviron in some one else's body, or naked. Coming through exactly as she had entered was possibly the one thing she had not expected. It was vaguely comforting though and for that she was thankful. 

Gooseflesh had broken out on her arms she noted.

Fox Mulder was strapped into a chair where her was restrained by a machine that was attacking his body. Lots of tiny needles had already pierced his skin, pulled it tight in unfamiliar ways. He seemed to be in great pain.

He was naked. 

"This is not real," the voice of Odin seemed to invade Mackenzie's mind directly without going in through her ears. "It is the earliest recording we have before his consciousness was damaged during their experimentation. Unfortunately it is also the best recording that we have. We hope the death experience has not tainted this recording too badly."

"His death experience?" she asked shocked.

"They recorded his death. It can be endured as a time based experience by simply replaying the quantum state of his consciousness throughout the process."

"That is disgusting."

"Your reaction is part of the reason why we need a human perspective. Please be aware that we can reanimate his body and recover his physical well being. That has never been in question. We need to determine if the consciousness that we have available for the body, is ethically able to return and join his people."

"You have doubts?"

"It is possible that his reason has broken down. We do not have any base line data upon which to make that assessment."

Mackenzie had an ugly thought in response to that comment. "If he is insane, what will you do with him?"

"Return his body to you. We see no reason to reanimate him if he cannot function."

"That is…" She shook her head.

"Alien?"

"Yes."

"You understand the nature of our problem then. We will animate this sensenviron when you are ready."

"What do I ask him?"

"Get him talking about himself. Free association is usually best."

"OK," she turned to Fox Mulder and addressed him. "Hello."

His eyes flicked open, almost in panic. "Who is that?" he demanded.

"Colonel Sarah Mackenzie," she answered. "US Judge Advocate General's department."

Mulder's eyes tracked the direction of her voice. His head remained constrained by the needles that pierced his skin. Mackenzie strode across the floor until she was within the range of viewpoints his eyes could reach.

"You're not real," he accused.

She smiled at him. "I am," she contradicted. "We both are. This," she waved her arm around, "is a contstruct, but you and I, we are real."

His eyes widened in negation. "No you're not," he said. His voice had taken a hoarse edge. "You're something that they've dredged up out of my subconsciousness. They can clone people. I should know I've come across enough of them."

"I'm real," she said. She held her arms away from her sides as though to indicate 'this is who I am'. 

Her clothing disappeared, leaving her naked to his gaze. She blinked for a moment in confusion, marshalled her reactions and then heaved one heavy sigh. Mulder's eyes followed the movement of her chest. 

*

"Huh," barked Harmon Rabka. "I wish I'd been there."

"It wasn't funny Harm."

"I don't suppose it was. It's not as though you put much more on display then, than you did during that trip to Australia."

"It wasn't the same. Not there in that alien environment. When I stripped in Australia, it was my choice."

"And this wasn't," he concluded.

"Yes."

"What did your alien make of that?"

"I'm getting to that."

*

Fox Mulder peered at her for a moment, as though committing the image of Sarah Mackenzies nudity to memory. His inspection had gone on long enough, she decided. She covered her self with her arms. "I think you have seen enough," she chided.

"Sorry," he muttered. "You must get a lot of that kind of unwanted attention." Her clothing reappeared.

The sensorium paused.

"You are disconcerted?" Odin asked her. "Our data suggests that this incident produced a moral ethical dilemma. Can you explain?"

She took a deep breath. "I am upset," she said.

"Yes. We can determine that. We gather many reactions from you. We wish you to consider your response and explain it to us."

"How I feel about it?"

"Yes, if you will."

She thought carefully for a moment before answering. There was nothing to be gained by equivocation, she was sure of that much at least. "I feel disrespected," she explained slowly, "as though my biological function is considered more important than my self."

"Your consciousness?"

"Yes."

"Continue. We also detected traces of positive responses on your part. Can you explain those tinges."

She thought for a moment. Making sure she knew exactly what they referred to. "I am slightly flattered that he considered me worthy of his attention."

"There is some element of mutual attraction?"

She looked at Mulder and smiled at the frankness of the aliens. "Yes some," she admitted. Brutal honesty was the only way forward from here.

"Is there more?"

"I experienced some minor element of liberation. The confines of the clothing are restrictive. Some element of sensuality as well."

"We have convergence on those traces. We still have more negative connotations in our measurements. We calibrate more than disrespect."

"Surprise."

"Yes, possibly."

"Cultural taboo."

"There is an element of conditioned response to it as well. We have sufficient convergence to proceed. Are you ready to continue?"

Mackenzie reminded herself that she was dealing with an alien. "Thank you," she said with heavy sarcasm.

"There is more?"

"Some. I can make some judgements from just this one interaction."

"Was that a morally inferior impulse on his part?"

"Yes."

"Is it atypical?"

She heaved a heavy sigh and admitted. "No. It was somewhat more real than the usual stripped-by-his-eyes response that men seem to do all the time. That was all."

"It was normal then?"

"Yes, but juvenile."

"Reversion to immature behaviour is sometimes inherent in the collapse of the moral and ethical conditioning of people who have been subject to destructive experiences. It may well be that we have a damaged consciousness to consider here. Please continue."

That didn't sound promising to Mackenzie. Despite his earlier actions she was already feeling a quietly disconcerting proprietary feeling for the plight of Fox Mulder. It was what she normally did under these circumstances, she empathised with her client. To some extent it was him and her, united against the mighty aliens. It was hard not to be parochial.

"How did you get yourself into this mess?" she asked Mulder.

His eyes sought hers. "I searched for my sister," he said. "This is my reward." His tone carried a note of heavy cynicism.

Mackenzie thought hard about that response. "Why would she be here?" she asked.

"These bastards kidnapped her when we were children. I can remember it. It took hypnotic regression, but I managed it. I remember it now. It was these little bastards." His eyes sought skyward as though the Asgards were watching them from above.

"Odin," Mackensie called to the air. "Is that true?"

"Possibly. We have very little information about what was done during the period while the Goa'uld were active and in control of our outpost."

"Do you know where she is?"

"No."

She turned her attention back to the man in the needling torture chair. "Did you hear that conversation Fox?"

"Nobody calls me Fox."

"Mulder then?"

"Yeah. OK."

"Did you hear my conversation with Odin?"

"Yes."

"Do you believe them?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because they always lie. Every time I get close to the truth, they hide it. They hide it behind subterfuge. There's a conspiracy. There are men working with them. Influential men."

"Odin, that was true wasn't it?"

"We believe it is. Yes."

"What were they doing?" she asked Odin.

"Building a genetic hybrid between the Asgard and the human," the alien answered.

She took a moment to digest that. "What for?"

"So they could colonise your world. The humans would be slaves, the Asgard/human hybrids would be the hosts of the Goa'uld. It would be a body with much longer life span while retaining the same human physical strength and stamina, much more capable than our own. That is one piece of solid information that we were able to gain from our investigation."

"He found all this out?"

"Yes."

"That was an impressive piece of investigative work."

"In part that is why we have gone to so much trouble to repair him."

She turned back to the prisoner anchored into the chair. "Mulder, what would you do if you could get out of this trap?"

"I would expose the truth. The people have the right to know."

"How would you do that?"

"Newspapers, the internet, the courts. I'd make the information public. These people have to be accountable."

OK, this was getting close to the matter. Sarah Mackenzie was closing in for the kill on her cross-examination.

"Wouldn't you want to chase them down and kill them?"

He frowned. "What would that achieve?"

"They would be gone."

"That's their way. It's not mine. There's been enough killing. I've seen it. I will not be responsible for it."

"Have you ever killed anyone?"

A hesitation. "Yes."

She moved closer to him, pitched her voice intimately. "Why?"

"We were attacked. My partner and me."

"You defended yourself."

"Or my partner. It has happened more than once."

"These events were the subject of an inquiry within the FBI."

"Always. Every time."

"Odin. How much can he hold back?"

"Nothing. He is not lying to you."

"This man has mainstream human ethics and behaviours."

"You have reached a conclusion that you are comfortable with?"

"Yes."

"Do you wish to remain in the sensorium, in case something comes up in discussion?"

"No."

"Very well."


	12. Chapter 12

The white glowing walls of the Asgard establishment reappeared. She brought her hand up before her face so she could look at it.

"Did something go wrong?" Samantha Carter asked her.

Mackenzie pulled herself upright and swung her legs over the edge of the altar. "No," she said distractedly. "We had a long discussion and reached a conclusion."

"You were only on there for a second."

"It didn't feel like that to me," Mackenzie said. She rubbed her eyes. "What are you going to do Odin?"

The Asgard regarded her with it's head tilted to one side. "He is obsessed?" the alien half asked.

"Yes. Very."

"That is bad for his ongoing development," Odin judged. "It leads to monomania and other anti-social afflictions."

"Yes, but that's not necessarily detrimental to his actions within our society. His behaviour will be within the bounds of human normal. He will function in much the same way as the rest of us."

"He needs to be brought out of his catatonic fugue state if he is to be counselled by your psychologists (was that derision in his voice?). That needs to be an experiential thing. I believe you use the term existential to describe this testing of existence through experience."

"Yes, essentially."

"He must be led, or brought out of that place where he hides. It is the only way to bring him through. Will you do that for us?"

"What does it involve?"

"Going in with him again and rescuing him inside the dreamscape."

Mackenzie had a nasty feeling about that. "Can we all go?"

"Certainly. We believe it will be necessary."

That was not a settling thought.

*

Sarah Mackenzie paused in telling her story. Harmon Rebka goggled at her for a moment before getting his mouth shut and his eyebrows back to a less stressing position above his eyes.

"What was it like?" Harm asked.

"Like the thing that Sony would really like to be able to do with Playstation V."

"Ha," said Harmon Rebka. "Playing computer games. You call that work."

"Oh it was work alright."

"So tell on," he said and smirked at her. She did not return the sentiment.

*

Sarah Mackenzie found herself in the same place where she had last seen Fox Mulder. The walls were obviously still too far away to be captured by the spill of light, but they were still there, sensed without being seen. The spill of light shone spectacularly on the restrained form of Mulder. He was still pinned into place by those tiny needles. That same inconvenient plumbing looked after his incontinence as he wore the last time she saw him.

She looked down at herself and was surprised to see she was wearing a form-fitting black singlet top, tucked into a pair of tight-as drill shorts, rolled up at the hem to make them all the shorter. 

Well it was better than the outfit she had worn momentarily when she was here last, she decided. And the new outfit had a certain - functionality to it, she decided. A holstered gun sat on each hip and something heavy and metallic was hanging from her back. She looked down at her feet and saw hiking boots and ankle socks. 

She knew what she was going to find even before she reached behind her neck and sure enough, there it was; a waist length plait. She hadn't worn her hair that long since she was a little girl. She felt around a little more and identified the thing hanging on her back, almost tangled in her plait. It was a huge knife. The thing might almost have been a broad sword it was so big. She was distracted from her inventory by someone's approach. 

Daniel Jackson appeared to step into the light, from no-where at all. His expression was momentarily confused. He noticed Mulder and winced. "That's gotta hurt," he said.

Mackenzie was aware of the emphasis that her posture (reaching behind her back to trace the edges of the knife scabbard) was having on her appearance, especially given the brevity of the outfit she had been granted, and hurriedly dropped her arms back to her sides. Jackson seemed vaguely disappointed by her change in posture, but said nothing.

"I feel like someone took a biopsy sample with a garden spade," Mulder said.

Jackson and Mackenzie behaved as though he hadn't spoken. Instead Mackenzie took a moment to absorb the outfit that Jackson wore into the dreamscape. He wore a robe that was so purple it was almost black. The hem trailed along the floor. The sleeves were voluminous enough to be worn as a dress by any catwalk model. He still wore his glasses though. He looked like a twenty-first century monk.

"So, what are we expected to do? Do you think?" Mackenzie asked. She turned back to look at Mulder and leant forward so she could peer more closely at the needles that pierced his skin. "How do you suppose we get him out of this contraption?" she asked.

Jackson spent a moment to meditate while he checked out her legs. He had a second look because the first one came up with a highly positive assessment. He decided that her butt needed checking out as well, so he spent a bit of time on that too. The shorts were a good selection he thought and congratulated Mulder on his dreamscape scenario.

"I have no idea," he answered finally. His ears had taken control of his mouth because his eyes were up to no good.

Jack O'Neill stepped into the light. His entrance brought Mackenzie back from her inspection of body-piercing-taken-to-extremes. 

O'Neill wore combat fatigues, and guns, many variations on the theme of guns. He had semi-automatic pistols, he had a sub-machine gun, and he even appeared to have a rocket launcher slung on his back. Oh, and he had lots of ammunition. It seemed to hang off him everywhere. Any part of Jack O'Neill that wasn't covered with gun metal, seemed to have a leather belt filled with spare cartridges for some sort of projectile weapon. A baseball cap and dark glasses completed the ensemble.

"Those guys must have been real pricks," O'Neill commented, looking at Mulder and frowning.

"Very funny," Mulder shouted at him. "Laugh? I almost started."

No-one took any notice.

Teal'c stepped into the light. Mackenzie goggled at the way he had been dressed. Well, if she though her outfit was brief, Sarah Mackenzie revised that thought the minute she spotted Teal'c. He looked like he was wearing his little brother's jock strap. It set of the cross-shaped wound in his chest beautifully. He was armed with a long piece of wood with a blackened and sharpened tip.

"Teal'c," O'Neill said in all seriousness, "that does not do you any justice at all."

"Oh I don't know," said Mackenzie.

O'Neill and Jackson stared at her for a moment.

Last of all came Samantha Carter. She stepped into the light and looked around at the others. She was dressed in navy blue. That was it. She was a twilight blue from neck to toe. It wasn't clothing as such; she was just coloured blue. It looked like her skin had been dyed…No it didn't. You couldn't see any of those distinguishing little bits that skin has on it. There was no hair, pimples, moles, navels, or any of those sort of squishy biological things that humans have attached to, or sort of embossed into, their person for the specific purpose of species propagation. Oh, and she had little metal things on her temple that looked like she was standing too close to the hot metal ladle in a blast furnace. She had obviously been splashed and burnt. Her hair was pulled back in the most severe hairstyle you could imagine that the local dragon behind the library desk wearing.

"OK," said Daniel Jackson. "We seem to be in a Playstation game."

"I can work that out for myself Daniel," said O'Neill. "Which one?"

"Seems to be a mixture of Final fantasy eight, tomb raider and star trek and... I have no idea where your look came from Teal'c," Jackson shook his head as if to clear an unwelcome thought from his mind. "Anyway, It looks sort of like he's picked the highlights of each."

"Wonderful," muttered O'Neill.

"I hope it does not get too much colder," said Teal'c.

Carter and Mackenzie spent altogether longer looking toward Teal'c for it to be just his comments that had drawn their attention.

"OK, everyone," O'Neill called. "Suggestions! What do we do?"

"Well we need to rescue Mulder, and get him out of here," explained Mackenzie. 

"Sort of figured that was the objective here. It's the nit picking little details that I'm worried about at the moment."

"We won't be under a time limit until we actually move him," Jackson suggested.

"Hey," shouted Mulder. "I'm here guys. You don't have to talk about me in the third person all the time."

"What was that noise?" asked Samantha Carter. She was still trying to work out how she could possibly get into or out of the outfit (?) she was wearing. It just did not seem to be physically possible.

"We have time to plan then," said Jackson.

"Look around Daniel," O'Neill said and pulled his cap from his head so he could muss up his hair a bit. "We plan, to do what?" he asked and placed the cap back on his head.

"OK, so I didn't take that thought through to completion before I started talking."

"Perhaps we should explore the walls of this place," suggested Mackenzie. "We might find a way out." She shrugged. It was a remarkably expressive gesture in that tank top, Jackson and O'Neill both agreed on that. Foundation garments, of any ilk, were not in the wardrobe where that lot had come from. Mackenzie fought an urge to wrap her arms around herself.

"OK," O'Neill brought everyone back to the real business at hand. "Who brought a torch with them?"

"I couldn't hide anything in this outfit," commented Carter. Jackson and O'Neill were suitably appreciative of the structure of her outfit.

"No offence Major Carter," Teal'c intoned, "but you did somewhat better than I in the selection of clothing."

Daniel pulled his torch from a pouch in his robe and switched it on. It looked like he was carrying a glow (nothing else, just a glow) in the palm of his hand.

O'Neill stared at the suspended glow and shrugged. Hey, it was all a dream. They would work out the rules eventually.

They stepped into the dark. It fled before them, banished into the…wherever it is that dark goes. (Hey, if there is a speed of light what is the speed of dark? And while we're on the subject of those sorts of things, how do keep off the grass signs get placed in lawns?)

They found a pair of archways. Each stood about three metres tall and had old ivy growing off the stonework and dangling in the portal so there was only enough room for a small person to march through without being tangled in the vines. Both archways appeared to lead into long hallways. A faint glow could bee seen in the distance along one of the tunnels. The other one was completely dark.

O'Neill looked along the tunnel with the light that was hovering somewhere in the distance. He looked up. Above the archway there was some engraving embossed into the rock.

"Can you read that, Daniel?" O'Neill asked.

"Is says 'here be dragons,'" Daniel replied. "And then it goes on to say, 'dungeons and impenetrable mazes."

"And the other one?"

"'Short cut home.'"

"Suggestions people."

"Well," Samantha Carter opined. "If I was the evil overlord of a place like this, I wouldn't place a sign that said 'short cut home' above the short cut home."

"No, neither would I," replied O'Neill, "but I'm a paranoid bastard."

"I agree with Sam," Mackenzie offered.

"I agree with O'Neill," said Carter.

"What?" asked O'Neill archly. "That I'm a paranoid bastard or just a…"

"I'll let you guess."

O'Neill and Carter shared a look. "Teal'c?" O'Neill asked.

"It does have a light at the end of the tunnel," Teal'c said. "Perhaps it's a fire." The last was added wistfully.

"Daniel?"

"I don't know," Jackson screwed up his face thoughtfully. "I have a bad feeling about that tunnel."

"Tell."

"Nothing concrete, just a vague foreboding."

"It's probably the sandwiches we had for lunch disagreeing with you. All right people, that's our decision. Let's go."

They stepped into the tunnel marked 'Here be dragons, dungeons and impenetrable mazes.


	13. Chapter 13

"So while the rest of us were here working our butts off and freezing to death, you were playing fantasy role playing games on a planet in a distant galaxy?" Harmon Rebka asked mockingly.

"Told you it was out of this world," Sarah Mackenzie answered.

"Some people have all the luck."

"Yeah, all bad. Wait on for the rest."

*

Daniel Jackson, Teal'c, Samantha Carter and Sarah Mackenzie stood in a circle and looked up at the light. They were transfixed like moths circling a flame. O'Neill looked on in disgust.

"OK," O'Neill said irritably. "So the light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be an incandescent lamp hanging from the ceiling. What does the sign next to it say Daniel?"

"'Due to power restrictions, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off until further notice.'"

The light went out.

It wasn't completely dark, just very dim. The tunnel was illuminated with an eldritch glow that seemed to come from every direction at once.

"You got that torch with you still Daniel?" O'Neill asked.

"Yep."

"Let's see it then."

Mackenzie un-hostered one of her guns and hefted the weight of it in her hand. It felt solid, well made, and purposeful. She felt much better to be carrying it. If one gun was good then, two was better. She un-holstered the second gun and felt twice as good.

The glow from Jackson's torch filled the cavern with just vaguely more illumination than there was with out it. It didn't make the cavern so much more light, as it made the cavern slightly less dark.

"We came that way," O'Neill said and pointed. "We keep going that way," He said and pointed along the corridor in the opposite direction. There were no other choices.

"Seems good to me," said Mulder.

"There it is again. Where is that noise coming from?" asked Carter.

"Hey! I'm here," Mulder called out. "Why doesn't anybody hear me?"

"Yeah I can hear something to," said Mackenzie. 'It's really faint, like…"

"What does it sound like to you?" Carter asked.

"I don't know, almost like a faint little voice," Mackenzie said hesitantly. "You?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"It is a voice you stupid pair of cows," Mulder screamed at the top of his voice. 'It's me. I'm talking to you."

"Can't make it out," said Carter. Her puzzlement was plain in her voice.

"Come on people," O'Neill called to his group and he set off in the lead.

They trooped on in the dim cavern, marching single file. Teal'c continued to push the hospital gurney upon which the restrained from of Fox Mulder reclined. I realise that this is a stereotyped image, that Teal'c could pass for a slave and that it might not be politically correct to use him in that way, but cultural conditioning goes down deep and they fell into that cliché with little resistance on any part.

The only sound was the squeak, squeak of the hospital trolley gurney that Mulder was sprawled upon. It's poor overloaded and misunderstood wheels were struggling with the whole idea of being forced to actually roll, rather than protest and infuriate. The gurney had all the directional stability of a well-crafted supermarket trolley and Teal'c was starting to think he might need orthopaedic surgery on his left knee if he had to push the thing too much further.

The air got steadily warmer and the humidity increased to match.

"I have a bad feeling about the heat," Jackson muttered.

"Sign Daniel," O'Neill called. He was pointing at the wall of the cavern.

Daniel shuffled forward and frowned up at the craved runes that some one had chipped into the wall. Their hand carving was terrible, but he could make it out. "It says, 'here be dragons.'"

"Oh wonderful."

"That explains the sounds of rustling scales on stone that we can hear," Carter said cynically.

"Yep," O'Neill agreed. "It sure would."

"I don't suppose there is any way to just like, tip-toe around it, is there?" Mackenzie asked.

Jackson looked her up and down. It was not in the nature of the usual male checking out, despite the inherently eye-catching nature of the outfit that she had been dressed in. The look that Daniel Jackson gave her was more in the line of inventory taking. She was suddenly aware of the weight of the guns in her hands and realised that 'no' there was no chance they could tip-toe around it, that was why they had been given all the weapons. It was so they could fight the things that they came up against. But dragons…?

"This is your doing," she hissed at Mulder.

"No it's not," he screamed back at her.

"I'm just going to have to ignore that noise," muttered Carter. "It's just distracting. I just wish I could figure out what it was."

"Some one needs to stay here and guard Mulder," O'Neill said.

"Me!"

"Me!"

"Me!"

"Me!"

"Decisions, decisions. Sam, you aren't armed. And Teal'c, that stick just isn't up to it. You two stay here. Daniel, Mac, let's go."

As if to underline the threat they all felt, a gout of flame and noise like a top-fuel dragster on steroids belched from within the cavern, and toasted the moss and ivy hanging from the far wall.

"OK," O'Neill said. "I admit, that was not a good way to start proceedings."


	14. Chapter 14

"A dragon," Harm asked.

"Hey it was a dream. You can have anything in a dream."

"But a dragon."

"There was worse to come."

"Than a dragon."

"Well yeah OK, that was bad."

*

They danced back into the corridor to join Teal'c, Carter and the prostrate Mulder, waving their weapons over their heads triumphantly.

They were covered in soot. They wore dopey grins.

"What happened?" Carter asked. They had been gone about three seconds. There had been a gout of flame that lit the place up like a fusion bomb and then there was a barrage of gun fire and then nothing.

"It went down after about the second bullet," O'Neill explained. "The rest was just overkill."

"Sorry," said Mackenzie contritely.

"Well at least we know the guns work."

"You didn't know before you went in?" Carter asked appalled.

"I was pretty sure."

"Jaaack."

"I was pretty sure."

"Now what?" asked Teal'c bringing everyone back to the task at hand.

"We keep going."

"I was afraid some one would suggest that," Jackson said.

"Bring it on," chanted Mackenzie. She was still on an adrenalin high.

*

" 'Beware the Vampire,'" read Daniel Jackson. "Is." He finished. "I don't think I got the grammar of that quite right," he added softly.

"Oh great," moaned Carter. "First a dragon and then a vampire. Just what sort of man has those sorts of demons in his head? Where is all the sexual imagery and such? Freud would have a fit if he saw this."

"Remind me," said Teal'c. "How do we combat vampires?"

"They're easy," said Jackson. "We pin it to the ground, stake it through the heart and cut its head off."

"You wouldn't do that to me, surely," purred the voice that the producers really wanted for Jessica Rabbit, but had to settle for Kathleen Turner when Aphrodite was unavailable.

"OK," muttered Samantha Carter. "That answers that question."

The woman in charge of the voice stepped into the cavern where the SG-1+ team was waiting to decide what to do next. She brought with her a sort of personal sphere of illumination that outshone both the gentle background light from the cavern walls, and the feeble glow that hovered above Jackson's hand.

Sarah Mackenzie summed the newcomer up reasonably quickly. She was pale of flesh, but with ruby lips and large dark eyes. Raven hair fell in long silken tresses to her waist. Her face was delicate; her mouth was sensual, with pursed lips and a teasing smile. Beneath that haunting visage was the body that the plastic surgeon had in mind when he set about re-manufacturing Pamela Anderson. She wore a series of gossamer fabric sheets that seemed to clothe her more by accident, than design. They gave the impression that a reasonable breeze would blow the whole ensemble into the next county. To any man with a smidgen of imagination, she would appear to be quite naked, despite the cloth that hung from all the protruding bits of her anatomy. Neither Jackson nor O'Neill suffered from that particular lack, imagination was there in abundance when presented with that kind of conceptual necessity. Teal'c on the other hand wasn't even aware that such a thing as imagination existed, let alone whether he had any. He raised a single eyebrow questioningly.

The newcomer transfixed both Jackson and O'Neill, and considering the way Mackenzie and Carter were decked out that was seriously saying something.

She stepped forward and placed a delicate and perfectly manicured hand onto the centre of Daniel Jackson's chest. Well not central, it was slightly to his left.

"You haven't see a Vampire around here?" Jackson asked. His voice had one of those little squeaky noises at the end of the question. He was having a problem with shortness of breath, palpitating of the heart and other biological manifestations of a physical desire to engage in propagation of the species. We shall be grateful for the voluminous draping of his robe so that we can avoid speculation upon that statement.

She smiled sunnily and revealed a set of canines that might have been more appropriate in the face of Lassie. "What, you expected some old guy with slicked back black hair and bad dental work," she said in one of those voices that tickles the earlobes and cause goose flesh all down the backs of males the world over.

"Well now that you mention it…" Jackson began weakly.

She stepped up closer and examined Jackson's neck intently. To Mackenzie's eyes the vampire seemed to be trying to decide the answer to such pressing questions as whether she should tilt her head to the right or the left when she bent to rip his neck open and suck the life out of him.

Jackson wore an expression similar to that seen on the faces of small furry animals. You know the one they wear when they are caught by the headlights of transcontinental transport vehicles. They wear it for a moment just before the first of those nine sets of wheels on the left hand side of the eighteen wheeler smears their pathetic little body along twenty five feet of tarmac.

It seemed that the committee for attending to this monster was electing itself. Mackenzie pushed Jackson aside roughly and stood in front of the vampire. Her hands rested on her hips, right beside the two holstered guns. "Perhaps you should try someone with a different set of hormones," she suggested.

"Don't mind either way," said the Vampire cheerily.

"Urk," said Mackenzie, unprepared for that response. Those eyes really were the most amazing colour…

They suddenly weren't in front of her any more.

"Don't look into her eyes," Carter gasped out. She was struggling on the ground with the Vampire. Mackenzie shook her head a couple of times and then pounced into the fray. She pinned the struggling legs of the Vampire to the ground as best she could.

"A stake!" cried Carter. "We need a stake."

"Where the hell are we going to get a stake here?" Mackenzie spat out, while she was struggling to restrain what looked like a reasonably slender pair of legs but appeared to be made from some sort of carbon fibre composite, and operated by an industrial hydraulic system.

"Teal'c," Carter called out. "Your spear. Use you're spear."

"Certainly major Carter," he agreed and stepped forward. Carter struggled to find a way to sit on the Vampire's chest, wrap her hands around the things throat and leave enough room for Teal'c to get a good shot at the thing's heart. It was a bit like playing a game of twister with a boa constrictor.

Teal'c grunted manfully, and shoved the tip of his spear into the struggling vampire, pinning it's chest to the ground. It continued to struggle.

"You missed Teal'c," Carter shouted. "Have another go, and hurry."

The Vampire kicked and bucked a few times.

"Hey you guys could come and help," Carter called to O'Neill and Jackson who were leaning against the gurney carrying Fox Mulder. They seemed to be staring at the conflagration without any signs of intelligence, at all, in the expression on their faces. "Jack, Daniel," (Yeah I know we could all use a drink at this stage, but don't mention that joke under any circumstances, OK?) "Get you head out of your ughn…"

Whatever she was going to say, she was interrupted by a blow to the jaw from Teal'c's fist when he finally managed to get the spear out of the Vampires chest. The vampire had been hanging onto the shaft for dear li…(undead? Maybe…) and it had finally slipped from her grasp.

"Yes Major Carter," Teal'c said. He pulled the spear the rest of the way out of the vampire's chest. It came free with a meaty sucking noise as the wound healed up. No one heard that sound over the frantic struggling, heavy breathing and the gutter-mouthed curses of the Vampire, and Samantha Carter. Still struggling to hold the vampire's legs through the slippery diaphanous piece of confectionary that it wore, Sarah Mackenzie thought that perhaps Samantha Carter had been hanging around the barracks of the airforce pilots and the SGC teams altogether too long. Her language was very colourful under stress.

Teal'c had another go, slamming the spear into the Vampire's chest. She screamed again, but nothing else changed.

"Again Teal'c," Instructed Carter.

He was ready for the Vampire grabbing hold of the shaft of the spear this time. So was Carter, she managed to get her jaw out of the way the second time.

Teal'c lunged with the spear yet again. 

Everything stopped. The Vampire was still.

"Oh thank god for that," Carter sighed and slipped from atop the Vampire's abdomen and sat on the cavern floor.

"OK! Good!" said O'Neill in a vaguely disquieted voice. "That appears to be over then." He shook his head a few times to clear the cobwebs from his brain. He blinked a few times as though trying to get the world back into focus again.

"The head," reminded Jackson. "We have to cut off the head."

"How are we to do that?" asked Teal'c.

"We could put a grenade in her mouth and pull the pin," Jackson suggested.

"Daniel," O'Neill said patiently. "You've forgotten one thing."

"What's that?"

"We don't have any grenades."

"There is that, yes. Rocket launcher? Then again, no."

Sarah Mackenzie rolled off the vampire's legs and onto her back. She was breathing like she had just won the Boston marathon. Some thing hard and metallic dug into her back, but it wasn't uncomfortable enough to make her change her position on the floor. That could wait until her breathing was less deafening.

"We need and axe, or a saw," suggested O'Neill.

"Hey all I've got is what you see here," Jackson said and held his arms out at his sides. Not a lot of detail was revealed by that gesture. There wasn't much light after the vampire's neutralisation and his robe was almost black and it was voluminous anyway. He could have hid half the cast of the move 'Fame' under that robe and nothing would have been visible. But he meant well.

"It's not as though I have much to offer," suggested Teal'c who was wearing just slightly more than the wardrobe for the movie 'Showgirls.'

"I don't know about that," said Carter, and then remembered her self. "Sorry, uncalled for."

Sarah Mackenzie had her breath back. She sat up and rubbed the bruises to her ribs and hips. She began to feel self-conscious when she realised that everyone was staring at her. She knew this outfit was going to be a problem. She checked to make sure all of her bits were still in the right places. They seemed to be.

"Um, that is a pretty big knife you have there," suggested Carter.

Oh, so that was the reason for their staring. For some reason she was vaguely disappointed. There had been something about that incident with the vampire that had upset a delicate balance in he psyche.

Mackenzie climbed stiffly to her feet and pulled the machete from the sheath on her back. She stared at the knife as though she had no idea what it was for. She tried to hand it to Jack O'Neill. He shook his head. She followed his sight line and saw the vampire on the ground. She looked like some-one had pinned a school girl to the floor like she was a butterfly in a entomologists display. Her face was remarkably ethereal, as though she was the supernatural supernatant stereotypical angelic schoolgirl that might advertise milk on television. OK, so you would feel like a right monster for even touching that angel.

"Oh give it to me," muttered Carter and snatched the knife from Mackenzie's hand. Carter knelt on the floor beside the prostrate Vampire. The impossibly perfect dark eyes followed the motion of the knife intently when she raised it above her head. The imploring look on the vampire's impossibly symmetrical features was not feigned in any way.

Mackenzie looked away as soon as she saw Carter begin the down stroke. There was no way she wanted to watch this, even in someone's dream. There was a thud, like a butcher hitting a slab of beef with a cleaver.

"Damn," said Carter, bitterly. "I only got about half way through."

"Oh gross," said Jackson.

"You'll have to have another go," said O'Neill. "The last thing we want is for that thing to come after us with it's head half off. I can just see it there, flopping around against it's back while it tried to run."

"Now there's an image that I would rather not have in my head," said Jackson.

Mackenzie had to look back; she couldn't help herself. She resisted for a while, and then gave up the struggle. She was just in time to see Samantha Carter struggling to pull the knife from the vampire's neck. "I think it's stuck between two vertebrae," Carter said.

"Just pull harder," suggested O'Neill.

Carter put her foot on the Vampires forehead and strained her back until the knife came free. She toppled off her precarious hold on the Vampire's head and fell on her butt. The tip of the knife described a perfect arc from the Vampire's neck to land behind Carter. All eyes followed the passage of the knife with hypnotised intensity. It hit no-one on the way past, more through good luck than good management.

"Here, let me have a go," suggested O'Neill. He took the knife from Carter and lined up the first blow.

Mackenzie couldn't watch.

Thump! Hack! Curse!

Wait.

Grunt, grunt, grunt.

"God, this thing is tough," in an undertone.

Thump! Hack! Mutter!

Grunt, grunt, grunt.

Wait.

Thump! Thump! Hack! Groan! 

"It's not a wood chopping contest Jack," Commented Jackson.

Thump! Clank!

"It might as well be," grunted O'Neill. "At last," he breathed and stepped away from the vampire's corpse just in time for it to turn to dust and blow softly along the cavity.

Mackenzie finally managed to turn her head so that she could see what was going on, having been unable to watch O'Neill's attempts to part the head from the neck. 

If that thing bled at all, she told herself, I am going to throw up.

All she saw was a waft of fine ash powder and she breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

"Now what?" asked Teal'c.

"First I'm going to get my breath back," said O'Neill. "Here," he handed the knife back to Mackenzie. There was no blood on the blade, just a few scratches and dings from the occasional contact with the stone floor.

Holding the knife with as little of her fingers as she thought she could get away with using without dropping it onto the floor, Mackenzie managed to put the knife back in the sheath she had fastened to her back without cutting herself.

"I think we need to go that way," suggested Jackson.

He pointed past the place where the Vampire had emerged.


	15. Chapter 15

"You are kidding me," Harm said. "This story gets better by the minute. What were you thinking when that thing looked you in the eye?"

"What is it with men and the whole lipstick lesbian thing?"

"If the cap…"

"Oh shut up Harm."

"I'll tell Brumby."

"I'll do that myself thank you."

"He'll probably find the whole idea…"

"Not another word."

"Or…?"

"Or I won't finish the story."

"I'll be good."

"Hmm."

*

"'Where wolves pack, man doth not dare'" read Jackson.

"Werewolves, I'll bet," guessed O'Neill.

"Is that footsteps I hear," said Mackenzie.

"Pawsteps maybe?" suggested Jackson.

"Shut up Daniel," suggested Carter.

"Hey."

"Halt, who goes there?" shouted Mackenzie. She was pointing both of her guns along the cavern, tracking the sounds of footsteps as they approached.

A shortish, slender red-headed woman stepped into the light cast by Jackson's palm top light. She had a ready pout and a mole beneath one nostril that was buried beneath her make up so that it was difficult to see.

She had a torch in one hand and a gun in the other. The torch shone on each of them in turn, before the barrel of the gun wavered slightly.

"Scully," Mulder shouted. "It's me."

"Is it my imagination, or is that noise getting louder?" Carter asked.

"Beats me," said Mackenzie. "Any idea what it is?"

"Not really. You?"

"Naw none."

"Are you a werewolf?" O'Neill asked. Her eyebrows didn't meet over her nose, and he was pretty sure that was a dead give away.

The red headed woman looked at him quizzically. "I'm Dana Scully. I'm a federal agent."

"Which federation?" Jackson asked.

"This is Mulder's dream Jackson," O'Neill said scathingly. "Even I worked out that she's an FBI agent."

"I'm looking for another agent, my partner, Fox Mulder," Scully said.

"That's him in the gurney back there," Carter said. "We're in his dream and trying to drag him out of his catatonia and back to reality."

"You'll never get Mulder back to reality," laughed Scully, greatly relieved. "He's never been there."

"Listen, we need to watch out for a werewolf," Mackenzie said.

"That was probably him back there on the floor," Scully said nonchalantly. "He tried to jump me a few minutes ago and well… They still bleed just like everyone else if he is a werewolf."

"What about silver bullets? You need silver bullets to kill a werewolf," said O'Neill.

"Is there another kind?"

"Of werewolf, how would I know?"

"No, bullets. Is there another kind of bullet? You know other than silver?"

"There's lead," suggested Jackson.

"What would you use lead for. Everyone knows you can't kill a werewolf with anything but silver bullets. I mean who would use lead bullets. Don't they spatter when they hit something solid?"

"Well, yeah," said Jackson slowly. "That's kind of the point with some kinds of bullets."

"Let's just keep moving," suggested O'Neill with a 'hands in front of me see I'm not dangerous' show of surrender. 

*

"What does this sign say Daniel?" O'Neill said breaking a silence that had lasted for quite some time. There didn't seem to be any end to the corridors of Fox Mulder's mind and they seemed to be trudging along all of them, one after another.

SG-1++ trailed to a halt and waited for enlightenment from Daniel Jackson. He stepped up to have a look at whatever it was that had caught Jack O'Neill's attention.

"Here be Dragons," Jackson translated. 

"Oh not again," said O'Neill wearily. "Mackenzie lets go and sort this out. The rest of you wait there with our friend here." He pointed to the prostrate and bound form of Fox Mulder.

"Hey, I am here," Mulder shouted.

"Did you hear that?" asked Scully.

"Yeah," answered Carter. "Seems to just come up every now and then. We have no idea what it is."

"Is it significant do you think?"

"Probably not."

Mackenzie was much better prepared for her second encounter with a dragon. She had her gun drawn and this time she remembered the safety.

"Same drill as last time," O'Neill told her. "Shoot first and leave the war cry until afterward." 

She nodded intently. He frowned and then nodded. 

The dragon looked much like the last one they encountered. It stood about twice the height of a large thoroughbred horse, but was about three times the width at the girth. The scales covering most of its body were coloured in multiple variations on the theme of metallic green. Its head was vaguely equine, to the shape of its flared nostrils and the wide spread eyes. All the better to triangulate on a target, as O'Neill explained last time.

It looked a lot like a giant lion from the shoulders down, all muscular-purpose and easy grace. It's tail was about four metres long and terminated in a nasty barbed tip. It watched their approach with wary cunning. The tail flicked back and forth like a cat at play. Steam vented from its nostrils.

"Does any thing about this one strike you as different to the last one?" Mackenzie whispered.

"Yeah, possibly. Can't put my finger on it though."

"If I didn't now better I would swear it was paying more attention than the last one."

"Oh what the hell," said O'Neill and drew his gun.

Before he could take any sort of aim, the dragon's tail flicked almost too fast for his eye to see, and batted the gun from his hand. The blow hurt like he had been hit with a baseball bat. The gun landed with a clatter on the stone floor, before sliding to a halt over by the far wall.

The dragon's eyes never wavered in their vigil on O'Neill.

"I think this one might be a bit more of a challenge than the last one," judged O'Neill.

"Whatever gave you that idea?" Mackenzie asked.

"What do you suppose happens if you die in this dreamscape? Game over, try again?"

"God I hope so."

"Yep, me too. I have an idea."

"What is it?"

"We separate, draw a gun in each hand and see if we can get a few bullets into it."

"That's not a plan, that's a pipe dream."

"I'm happy to entertain any and all ideas."

"How about we run away?"

"I'm not sure that is a great idea either."

"Why not?"

"Well for one thing I think it's angry at me and for another it appears to be blocking the only way forward."

"God I hate it when other people use logic on me."

"OK. Ready?"

"As I'm ever going to be."

"On the count of three."

"OK."

"One."

"Hang on do you mean at three, or after three?"

"What's the difference?"

"Long enough to mean the difference between life and death."

"How melodramatic?"

"Yeah but…"

"After three."

"OK."

"One, two."

"Hold it."

"What now?"

"Do you know whether it can count or understands what we're saying?"

"Let's assume that it can't do either. OK?"

"OK."

"Right, on my count. One, two, three."

Lets examine what happened over the next two seconds in slow motion, so we can have some hope of understanding what went down.

O'Neill drew his gun with his left hand. His bruised right hand refused to close on the second gun and he only succeeded in knocking it out of his holster and onto the ground, dislodging the safety at the same time. While it tumbled to the floor we have to move across to Mackenzie to watch what she was doing.

Mackenzie managed to wrap the fingers of her right hand around the butt of one gun and get it clear of the holster. The gun on her left jammed in the holster and despite the best efforts of her hand to clasp it and drag it out, she failed.

The dragon decided that Mackenzie was the healthier of its attackers and lashed out at her first. Before its tail had moved more than a metre, it decided that it had made a slight miscalculation and adjusted the trajectory of the tail with a contemptuous flexure of a few of the muscles of its lower back.

Back to O'Neill. He realised that the gun on the floor was not going to do him any good and he decided that the best way froward was to bluff. He aimed his real gun and also the pretend one, which was not actually in his right hand, at the dragon. He attempted to squeeze both triggers. One of those might work, he thought. He just hoped that the one that worked was the one attached to a real gun.

Back to Mackenzie. She waved the one gun she managed to un-holster at the dragon. She even managed to get it aimed more or less at the dragon and squeezed the trigger.

The dragon's tail flicked O'Neill's gun out of his hand, just before the bullet reached the end of the barrel. The change in orientation of the gun resulted in the bullet heading straight for the cavern ceiling and we'll follow it's trajectory for a moment. It missed the dragon's head by a little over half a metre, clipped a stray stalactite (or mite, I'm not sure and can't be bothered looking it up) ricocheted off the slimy piece of calcium compounds and onto the back wall of the cavern. It was spinning wildly by this stage and making an unbelievably cheery 'wheee' noise as it careened out of control about the cavity.

O'Neill dived for cover, thinking that lying flat on his stomach might be safer from the wayward bullet. We will leave him while he is suspended in mid air. Nothing will change appreciably in his circumstances before we come back to him.

Mackenzie never actually reached the point where her trigger finger closed the release of the firing pin enough for the charge in the cartridge to ignite, before the dragon's tail finished it's twitchy trail and collided with her hand in a bone jarring impact that knocked her gun flying.

The dragon decided that enough was enough and let out a gout of flame that looked more like the afterburner of an F18-A hornet than anything that had a basis in biological reality.

O'Neill would have taken the flame square in the chest if he had been standing up. As it was, the baseball cap that he had been wearing, and had lost during his dive for the floor, turned into a little cloud of carbon dioxide, water vapour and a few traces of soot.

O'Neill hit the floor with a thud, landing on the gun that he had dropped. He was lucky it didn't go off and blow a hole in his chest wall and let most of his circulatory fluid out.

Mackenzie stood transfixed as the muzzled of the reptilian flamethrower rotated to face in her direction. The smell of swamp gas hit her nostrils. Her life flashed before her eyes, and we will ignore that because we haven't got time to list all things that she did while she was drunk at university parties, before the flame stops being a little pilot light in the bowels of this monster and becomes a little more imposing.

O'Neill fumbled with the gun that he found beneath his chest but the barrel was caught in the front of his shirt, between the second and third button.

"Mew," said Mackenzie and did the only thing she could do under the circumstances. She shut her eyes. If this hadn't been Mulder's dream, she might have wet herself as well, but she didn't.

A crack like a whip rang out.

The Dragon looked momentarily surprised.

Lying on the floor, O'Neill looked momentarily appalled, thinking that the gun pointed into the interior of his shirt might have gone off and actually released his circulatory fluid to the atmosphere. 

Mackenzie opened her eyes and was surprised to find that she could in fact do that.

The dragon looked kind of different. One of its eyes looked bloodshot (well more bloodshot than normal). In fact when she looked closely, the eye was actually a bloody pit in it's head. Dragon's are a little slow on the uptake and this was taking a little while to work out that it was actually dead.

The message got through eventually and it began the laborious task of falling down.

It chose to fall directly at O'Neill, thus attempting with the last firing of its neurones to take one of its attackers with it.

It was a vain hope. O'Neill was still worried about the gunshot and sat up to be sure his skin was still intact.

The dragon landed on the stones with a thud that was probably heard in Washington (DC) which was actually in a different galaxy to where these people were at the time of the dragon incident.

"Why the hell did you people have to get so close to the damn thing?" asked Dana Scully. She lowered the smoking barrel of her gun from in front of her face and shook her head. "Come on let's get out of here."


	16. Chapter 16

"Enter the Dungeons," said Jackson.

"What?" asked O'Neill, he hadn't been paying any attention and missed Jackson's translation.

"It says that this is the entrance to the dungeons."

The air was filled with a sound just like a giant steel door closing against a stone wall, followed by the sound of giant keys turning in a lock.

"That was just what I thought it sounded like," guessed O'Neill.

Carter stepped out of the light momentarily before returning with the bad news. "Yep," she confirmed. "We're locked in back that way."

"Of course there's now a wall in front of us as well. Right Daniel?"

"Hang on while I have a look."

"You probably don't need to bother."

"You're right, there's a wall here as well."

"Any ideas Jack?" Carter asked.

"Nope."

"We could sit here and stave to death," suggested Teal'c. "That would appear to be our only option."

"You'd die of thirst first," said Scully. They all looked at her. "Trust me on that," she added. "I'm a doctor."

"Not a dragon slayer," said O'Neill. 

"Only on my days off," she said cynically, "and in Mulder's dreams."

"We've been equipped with whatever we need to get out of each challenge that we've come too right?" asked Jackson.

"Right," chorused the SG-1++ team.

"So we should be able to get out of this somehow too."

"That's a bit like saying blue is a colour and red is a colour, therefore blue equals red," suggested Scully.

"In a way that's true," said Carter. "I mean they're both electromagnetic radiation in the narrow band between infrared and ultraviolet. Trust me on that I'm a physicist."

"Oh really? Where did you do you're degree, mine was at Harvard?" Scully asked.

"In physics?" asked Carter.

"Yeah, the medical degree was post grad."

"Oh, right, mine was from…"

"Ladies," interrupted O'Neill. "The lock. Perhaps you two physicists could put your heads together and come up with a way to open the lock."

Carter reached up to the lock and touched it with the hand that was encased in the partial nanotechnology glove arrangement that she carried as part of the Borg Collective. She was actually 7 of 9 in this manifestation, not Samantha Carter. A tiny little tool jutted from her index finger and entered the lock mechanism. Less than a second later, the lock sprang open. 

"See I told you," crowed Jackson.

"Well done Daniel," said O'Neill with just a hint of mockery amongst the sarcasm. "You too Sam," he added sincerely.

"I don't think we'll bother to add their distinctiveness to the collective," suggested Carter. "It might lower the collective IQ to dangerously low levels."

They stepped through the open door and crept into the cavern once again.

"There doesn't appear to be any guards," commented Jackson.

"Don't look a gift horse in the bush," said Teal'c. "Did I get that right?"

"Just stick to silent sullen slave-like impassivity," suggested Daniel Jackson.

*

Daniel looked at the engraving and opened his mouth to speak. He found that task unfamiliarly difficult because of the hand that was clamping his lips shut.

"Don't even think it out loud," O'Neill hissed into his ear. O'Neill had worked out what Daniel was doing. "Don't read the sign out loud!" O'Neill hissed as well, to forestall the natural tendency to which Daniel had been surrendering throughout their escapade. "I'm going to take my hand away and I want you to stay quiet. OK?"

Daniel nodded.

O'Neill released his hand slowly, waiting to be sure that Daniel was not going to speak again before releasing him completely from his grasp.

O'Neill held a single finger to his lips for Jackson's benefit.

Daniel paused for a moment, thought things through and then closed his mouth with an audible snap.

"I have a theory," O'Neill began. "Everything you say has been true so far. Now that may be because you have been reading the labels on the hazards. I grant you that may be the case. But suppose, hypothetically like, that it was only because you said those things, that they came true."

Jackson nodded appreciatively.

"Say we came into this dreamscape as what we appear to be," suggested O'Neill, warming to the task. "I am a warrior, Mac is a tomb raider, Sam is a lock picking thief, Scully is a sceptic, Teal'c is the token afro-American cast as a slave because we had no other role for him in this decadent and politically incorrect story. And say you came in, not as a cleric as we first thought, but as a wizard."

"OK," Jackson said. 'I can go with that."

"If that were true, then you are probably conjuring up our troubles for us.'

"It is a theory," agreed Jackson. "Yes."

"It's actually only a hypothesis," judged Scully. "In order to be a theory, it first has to be postulated and then tested. That hasn't been tested yet."

"What?" asked O'Neill now thoroughly confused by that non-sequiter.

"She's actually right," agreed Carter.

O'Neill cast one of his 'et tu Sam' expressions at her.

"We could test your hypothesis," suggested Scully.

"We could, yes."

"We just get Daniel to say the thing wrong and see what happens."

O'Neill nodded enthusiastically. "Now careful Daniel. What does it say?" he looked at Daniel significantly.

Daniel nodded. "It says, 'penetrable passage'," he lied.

Nothing happened. The walls stayed exactly as they had been.

"For a while there I thought we might have been stuck in an impenetrable maze," suggested Mackenzie, "unable to get out."

"Can you read those things?" O'Neill asked, surprised.

"Yeah," she said. "Can't you?"

"No."

She looked at him in surprise for a moment.

O'Neill hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. "But you're a tomb raider, of course you'd be able to read it. D'oh. Come on lets get on with this."

*

"What does it say Mac?" O'Neill asked. He stood beneath a banner with squiggly runes carved into it.

Sarah Mackenzie skipped up to stand beside him. She squinted into the gloom so she could make out the runes. "Abandon hope," she said.

O'Neill nodded. "Daniel?" he called.

"Be confident," Jackson said. "You're almost there."

"Good ad lib," Carter offered sotto voce.

"Hopefully the end of this farce is just around the corner," Scully muttered.

"May the Farce be with you," Mulder shouted. He had an audience of nil.

Teal'c continued in his role of silent slave. He pushed the gurney along, with the immobile body of Fox Mulder secured into the cushioning. All four wheels had developed a distinct squeak, and the left front wheel had developed a distinct wobble to go with it now. Every now and then Teal'c had to kick the gurney to make it behave its self. At least it had lost its inappropriate political leanings now. It was reluctant to go either left or right, preferring to remain un-manipulable in either direction.

"This is not the sort of adventure I signed on for," Scully muttered.

"Hey, Scully, you think you've got it bad," muttered Mulder.

Everyone looked over their shoulders, but none of them could make out where that sound was coming from.

*

The dim cavity opened into a dim grotto. From a scenery point of view it was no improvement. The light was still pretty limited, as though it was too scared to come out and play with all that nasty dark hanging about.

The grotto was large, perhaps as big as the gate room beneath Cheyenne Mountain. It was essentially empty. In the dim light they could make out the signs of some sort of activity on the far side of the space. They marched across to see what was going on.

O'Neill and Mackenzie had their guns out. Scully would have too, but there was already enough hardware on display and she thought this might be a good time to try subtlety. 

Teal'c had his spear raised. It was good theatre, but not really all that intimidating.

Carter pushed the gurney.

Jackson was looking around for runes to mis-read, but found none.

From the gloom, the shape of a throne resolved. Seated on the throne was a person wearing a black robe. He turned to face the team from SG-1++ and grinned, not that he had a lot of choice in facial expressions. Teeth he had; lips he had not. In fact his head was a little light on for skin entirely. The deaths head mask was all the more real for being the actual Death's head that was staring out at them. Not having any eyelids sort of explained the fixed staring aspect of the bleak visage that confronted the SG-1++ team. At the back of the empty eye sockets was a twinkle of actinic brilliance that could momentarily blind any one daft enough to look at it.

"It's Death," guessed Mackenzie.

Seated around the throne were a dozen little grey naked aliens with huge dark eyes staring out from their oversized heads and abbreviated faces.

"And his Asgard minions," added Jackson.

"Is that like a rock band?" asked Carter. "You know, Death and the grey minions." She giggled nervously.

"It'd be a pretty lame name for a rock band," commented O'Neill. He resorted to inconsequential sarcasm when he was terrified.

"What? Worse than Duran Duran?" asked Jackson.

"Def Leopard is a pretty awful name," Carter said.

"What? And you think Limp Biscuit isn't?" added Scully.

"You've all missed the worst of them all," said O'Neill. "I used to listen to Mott the Hoople."

"You're kidding," said Carter. "That's not a real band name. Is it?"

"It sure was."

"OK, you win." Every one else nodded.

"WHEN YOU ARE QUITE FINISHED," said Death in a voice like two lead-slabs rubbing together. "WE HAVE AN APPOINTMENT."

"Not with us you don't," O'Neill said with false bravado.

"NO, ONLY WITH HIM," Death said laconically and pointed at the increasingly tatty looking gurney carrying the prostrate form of Fox Mulder. "THE REST OF YOU ARE JUST AN UNEXPECTED BONUS."

"I think this might be a good time to run," suggested O'Neill.

They took a vote and agreed six to zero to give it a go.

A dozen Asgard minions leapt into rowdy pursuit. O'Neill thought he heard the whinny of a giant horse issue from behind the throne.


	17. Chapter 17

By mutual agreement they figured they had reached the crux of the matter with Mulder. They had reached the point where they were dealing with the renegade Asgards and the spectre of death. Now if they could just stop for a breather, drink a cup of hot caffeine laden drink of their choice, and discuss the thing rationally then they were sure a solution could be found.

Unfortunately all they could do in the immediate aftermath of the revelation of which entity they were dealing with in this dreamscape, was to run pell mall along the caverns, like headless chickens. They even lacked the breath to discuss among themselves what steps they should be taking in the matter (other than long, frequent ones).

"I'LL BE THE DEATH OF YOU YET!" called a tomb like voice from behind them. It was accompanied by the thunderous peal of hoof beats.

They ran along the cavern. Mackenzie was pushing Mulder's gurney, with a hand placed on either side of his feet. The squeak from the wheels had become a falsetto counterpoint to the bass thudding of her heart and the pounding of her pulse in her ears.

"YOU LOOK SCARED HALF TO DEATH, LET'S FINISH THE JOB," called same voice. The staccato beat of the horse's hooves seemed to be stalking rather than galloping as though the rider had all the time in the world and need not hurry. 

Mackenzie drew breath through a burning throat. She followed the careening passage made by Daniel Jackson and the glow he carried in his hand. Who the hell conceived of this game where I get to dress like this, she bitched. The shorts were fine; it was the top that was the problem. Any sort of brassier would have been a good idea, but no, she had to wear this thing and she was bouncing around painfully.

About six feet ahead of her, Mulder's face leered back at her evilly. He had a great view of the action through the gap between his feet, and he wasn't changing his position for the world.

Mackenzie caught the expression on his face. "I should have known," she muttered breathlessly and then failed to make the next corner. The cavern went left and the gurney had the directional amenability of a supermarket trolley. Under threat from rogue vandals, it had developed a genuine law and order through punishment leaning and really wanted to turn right at this point. 

In the gurney's resulting dispute on policy direction with Sarah Mackenzie, it crashed into the wall, partially dislodging Mulder from his stupor.

"Heh," said Mackenzie evilly. "Serves you right, you pervert."

Jack O'Neill took the time to help her right the trolley, pausing in his continual delivery of streamline lead pellets along the cavern, aiming in the general direction of the on-rushing hoard of Asgard minions.

For their part the Asgard were 'leap-frogging' one another, from one rocky hiding place to another, and scampering effectively along behind SG-1++'s chaotic flight through the cavern. O'Neill hadn't hit one yet, but at least he was keeping them cautious.

Dana Scully took over the delivery-of-lead-pellets role while O'Neill was busy, pumping a few werewolf killers into the stonemasonry behind them.

"Come on, we have to keep moving, or they'll catch up," wheezed Carter.

"It's this damn gurney that's slowing us down," panted Mackenzie.

"I should be pushing that," offered Teal'c.

Mackenzie and Carter both looked at him quizzically.

"You aren't a slave any more, Teal'c," Carter explained. "Just because you have been dressed as one doesn't mean that…"

"I am quite considerably stronger than either of you," he explained.

"Just let him push the damn thing and get moving," instructed O'Neill.

"You tell 'em buddy," shouted Mulder.

"I could have sworn that was Mulder's voice," said Scully, "just really faint."

They gathered themselves together and ran on trailing behind the fleeing Daniel Jackson, who was lighting the way. The balance of SG-1++ followed along behind. Teal'c and the contrary gurney came next in line, squeaking ominously. Scully and Carter brought up the next rank. At the very back of their panicked cavalcade, came Jack O'Neill using up his store of ammunition at a furious rate, and Sarah Mackenzie doing her best Angelina Jolie impersonation, without quite the right lip or attitude.

Shots rang out.

The sound of hooves followed them.

"DEATH TO THE INTERLOPERS, OH, SILLY, THAT'S ME," followed by a ringing hollow echo of maniacal laughter.

Jackson skidded to a halt. The rest of SG-1++ almost skidded into him.

"It's a sign," he said. 

"Save the religious revelations until later," Carter cut him off.

"No, no, no, it says 'this way home'," Jackson said. "Don't you see, everything that I read out loud; happens. If we had taken the hall that said 'shortcut home' right back at the beginning, we would have been spared all of this."

"Yeah and if Neo had taken the other pill," Scully said, "the Matrix would have been really short movie."

"No," Jackson explained patiently. "Don't you get it? This way home, means this way home. We just follow the sign and we're out of here."

"OK, got that." O'Neill interjected. He broke off his attempts to ventilate every last Asgard in Mulder's dreamscape long enough to ask; "Which way does it point Daniel?"

O'Neill patted at his ammunition belts and realised that his inexhaustible supply of ammunition; wasn't. He could resort to throwing the guns at them; that might keep them busy for a while.

"Straight up," Jackson said.

"Wonderful," muttered Scully. She stepped around O'Neill and took up the vanguard with Mackenzie. The pair of them were crouched either side of the cavern, loosing off shots in counterpoint percussion harmony.

"So what do we do?" Carter asked.

"Give me a leg up," Jackson suggested. "I'll see what's up there."

The gun in Mackenzie's left hand stopped going 'crack,' 'crack' and went 'click,' 'click' instead.

It had never needed ammunition before she cursed. Why did it decide to run out now? She tossed it aside and continued firing with the other one. Across the hallway, Scully's gun made a similar change in percussive accompaniment.

Behind them, O'Neill held his hands cupped for Jackson's foot. O'Neill boosted Jackson up. His head disappeared from view, out of the range of the feeble glow from the light source on the floor.

Scully popped the clip from her gun and placed the spent one in her mouth while she rooted around in the pockets of her jacket for the spare. It came free from the pocket and she slammed it home. She looked across at Mackenzie and saw her staring behind her at the place where Jackson and O'Neill were testing Jackson's theory of Mulder's Dreamscape architecture.

Death rounded the bend in the cavern, riding atop the biggest horse Scully had ever seen. It must have been nineteen hands of white stallion, with the wicked-est mane and the longest snow-white tail. 

"If we don't get a move on we'll all be dead meat," Scully called over her shoulder.

Death seemed to have become bored with the bad puns and settled for grinning maniacally.

Mackenzie watched what happened to Jackson behind her, blinked and looked again. That wasn't what happened at all, she decided. His head just disappeared entirely, and she knew that couldn't really happen.

In the distance Death seemed to reach a decision. He raised his scythe and flicked the reins.

The sound of thundering sound of rushing hooves was closing in. A quarter of the apocalypse was nigh. They were running out of time. In ten quick spasms of her index finger Scully emptied her second clip, to no avail.

Mackenzie's right hand gun went click, click. She hadn't even realised that she was still firing the thing until it stopped working.

She reached a decision. "Shove Mulder through first," she shouted to O'Neill. "This is all in his head. If he's gone then maybe all of this will all vanish with him."

"It's worth a try," agreed O'Neill. Between them, Teal'c and O'Neill stood Mulder upright and pushed him up to the black void. 

Death swooped, waving his scythe over his head. He swung the blade at Scully.

"No!" screamed Mulder.

His head disappeared.


	18. Chapter 18

Mackenzie paused and looked into her coffee cup. Only the cold dregs were left.

"So what happened?" Harm asked.

"I definitely have to get another cup of coffee," Mac said and climbed to her feet. "You coming."

"I want to know what happened next?"

"I'm not talking any more until I get coffee."

*

They came awake one after another; all of them disoriented. They found them selves lying on the little raised altars that the Asgards had scattered about the place.

"We got him out," Mackenzie told Odin. There might have been a question mark at the end of her statement. Even she wasn't sure.

"I believe so," Odin agreed.

"He should be OK," she half pleaded. "You should be able to return him to us. He will be OK."

Odin cocked that oversized head of his to one side before saying anything more. "Well, if you're sure," that was said rather dubiously. "We could fix his obsession, at least enough for your people to take over."

"I'm not sure he would want you too," Mackenzie noted absently. What Samantha Carter had said to her immediately after she left the sensorium the first time suddenly intruded into her awareness. They had only been gone a moment in time. Odin had barely moved from where he stood when they went into the dreamscape. Even this conversation was longer than the time they had been gone. "You continued questioning him after I left haven't you? How long has that continued? What has he asked you for?"

"You are correct, we have kept questioning the recording of Mulder. It was running in parallel to your actions. Yours was a less than total probability of success. We could not risk all on the chance that you would be able to bring him out of his catatonic withdrawal schema. Our discussions with the alternate personality recording have taken several hours of your subjective time. He has asked to stay with us and find his sister."

"Can you give him that? Is that a viable outcome from this situation."

"We will consider his request. By it's nature, it is not what you think it is. There is more to it than you could possibly imagine. We will debate our decision. Thank you Colonel Mackenzie. We have our answer. We will consider the options."

She looked at the Asgard in surprise. "That's all?"

"Yes. You may go home. Jack O'Neill, it has been nice to deal with you once again. Good luck to you and yours."

O'Neill nodded and took Mackenzie's arm. He pulled her toward the corridor and the stargate. She came along, not unwillingly exactly but...

"But…" she objected. "When will he be free?"

"What is free?" Odin asked. "If he is constrained by the bounds of an obsession, how free can he be? What free will does he exercise? We will decide among ourselves if the consciousness of Fox Mulder should be returned to a corporeal existence. We have enough information to reach that decision. Will we return him to Earth? That decision, whichever way we decide, will follow. We have much to consider. We have much to negotiate." 

"But…" she struggled against O'Neill's insistence that she come along with the SG-1 team.

"It'll work out," O'Neill said. "Might take them a while. You achieved a great result. He may yet live again."

"But…"

"Take this with you," said the Asgard. Something appeared inside her hand. "We will communicate our decision to you once we know it ourselves. This will convey it to you once we know."

And suddenly they were through the gate and they rode the roller coaster ride home.

*

"That was it," she said to Harm Rebka. "They bundled me into a chopper and straight back here. No one has answered any of my questions since. They just hide behind their security smoke screen and won't come out, and that's all I get." She shrugged expressively.

"The case was a bit of a fizzer," he commented in reply.

She smiled a slow vulpine grin with no mirth. "I don't know. Sam probably got the information she needed on the distortion that the Asgard's gate made in space. I'm sure the video recording that Daniel Jackson made with that tiny camera he had fixed to his glasses gave them some clue as to how the Asgard mapped their gate to other galaxies."

Harm stared at her for a moment and then grinned slowly. "Did they tell you that?"

Her answering grin was slow to develop as well. "What do you think?"

He fell silent for a minute. He had another idea. "So they're completely secure?"

"Can't get anything on them. Nothing. They even gave me a grunt, who knew nothing about what was going on, to fly me back to Washington. They weren't prepared to give me another flight - chance - where I had access to Samantha Carter."

"I could make some inquiries," suggested Harm warming now to the idea that he was being sent up. "That should bring a few things to light." Including the story behind this story, he thought. He might have to use up a few favours but he was prepared to do it to get to the bottom of this story.

"Best of luck,' she advised ruefully. "They might as well not even exist as far as I can find out, and I tried. Believe me."

He had his own thoughts on that matter. The cynicism on his face stood out like a beacon.

Sarah Mackenzie reached into her desk draw and pulled out a metallic sphere about the size of a tennis ball. She pushed it across the space between them and then let go. It floated in the air above the desk and reflected the rest of her office environment like a perfect mirrored surface.

"That's apparently what quantum fixed material should look like," she said triumphantly. "Samantha Carter explained it to me. It has the inertia of a solid platinum ball, and is unaffected by gravity. Funny stuff. Carter wanted to keep it, but the Asgard gave it to me. When they have something to say, it'll come through that thing."

Harm watched the sphere floating in the air above the desk. His mouth hung open. 

Mackenzie reached across the desk and pushed his jaw upward gently, so his teeth clicked together. She smiled fully for the first time that morning. 

It was time for another cup of coffee. 

It was funny how a burden shared was a burden halved. She felt much better already.


End file.
